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Authorized Julianna Baggott Website Reviews of Julianna Baggott's Works
From This Country of Mothers: Poems Blurbs I don't want to be a national treasure, too old-codgery, something wheeled out of a closet to cut ribbon. I prefer resident genius, or for the genius to be at least undeniable. I'd like to steer away from the declaration by far her best. Too easily I read, the predecessors were weary immigrant stock. The same goes for working
at the height of her powers, as if it's obvious I'm teetering on the edge of senility. I don't want to have to look things up: lapidary style? I'd prefer not to be a talent; as if my mother has dressed me in a spangled leotard, tap shoes, my hair in Bo-Peep pin curls. But I like sexy, even if unearned. I like elegance, bite. I want someone to confess they've fallen in love with me and another to say, No, she's mine. And a third to just come out with it: she will go
directly to heaven.
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Julianna Baggott
Poet and Fiction Writer Julianna Baggott, the Kratz Center Writer in Residence for Spring 2004, will read from her work in the Alumnae House at Goucher College, at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 7. The reading is free and open to the public (no tickets required) and will be followed by a reception and book signing. Poet and fiction writer Julianna Baggott is the author of This
Country of Mothers, a collection of poems, and three novels: the
best-selling Girl Talk (translated
into five languages), The Miss America
Family, and most recently The Madam,
based on the story of her grandmother's upbringing in a house of prostitution
during the 1920s and 30s. Two young adult novels, The
Anybodies, are forthcoming under the nom
de plume N.E. Bode. Julianna
Baggott majored in French and Creative Writing at Loyola College in Baltimore,
and studied at the Sorbonne before going on to earn her MFA in Creative Writing
from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
She has taught creative writing at Bucknell University, the University of
North Carolina, and the University of Delaware.
Currently she works with writing students privately in Delaware, where
she lives with her husband and three children. Rodney Jones praises Julianna Baggott's poetry for "themes sharp as razors," declaring that "her poems of private life are expansive enough to suggest a vision of a political and historical era." Linda Pastan credits Baggott's poems with "a fierce imagination which probes the ordinary details of a woman's life and lights up both the sacred and the profane." Similar qualities in her prose fiction have allowed her both to define and transcend the category of work by young woman now praised or sometimes disparaged as "Chick Lit." Baggott's fiction is at least as smart and stylish as anything else stuck in that pigeonhole, and the swiftness of her wit and her love of language give her work an enchanting quicksilver surface that few other authors in that genre could match. Moreover, her work has a depth and durability that most other writing gilded by the trend cannot claim. Beneath the sharp satirical humor and the charm of her writing lie a real historical sense and a deep insight into the twenty-first century evolution of the American family romance.
"I'd always wanted to be Miss America so that I could have the perfect family. Who else would eventually be the perfect American wife and mother other than Miss America? She'd eventually become Mrs. America, right? In being the perfect wife and mother, I could erase my mother, my father, my brother and me and start over, proving that there was higher ground, that I'd built it, and that I could reign over it. I could erase my childhood by perfecting someone else's. This is a tragic flaw in thinking, I know now. But I wanted to have the Miss America family-that's what I called it-with a husband named Steve, one son and one daughter, Troy and Wendy...And so I got married. It's what people do." |
Books by Julianna Baggott
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