Event is Monday, October 15 at 5:00 pm at Off Square Books.
Jaime Harker holds a Ph.D. in English from Temple University. She is a professor of English and the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches American literature, gay and lesbian literature, and gender studies. She has published essays on Japanese translation, popular women writers of the interwar period, Oprah’s book club, and and Cold War gay literature. She is the author of America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars and Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, and the co-editor of The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Cluband 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage. She is on the editorial board of Pickering and Chatto Publishers Book Series “Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace.”
Jaime Harker uncovers a largely forgotten literary renaissance in Southern letters. Anchored by a constellation of Southern women, the Women in Print movement grew from the queer union of women’s liberation, civil rights activism, gay liberation, and print culture. Broadly influential from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Women in Print movement created a network of writers, publishers, bookstores, and readers that fostered a remarkable array of literature.
With the freedom that the Women in Print movement inspired, southern lesbian feminists remade Southernness as a site of intersectional radicalism, transgressive sexuality, and liberatory space. Including well-known authors like Dorothy Allison and Alice Walker, as well as overlooked writers, publishers, and editors, Harker reconfigures the Southern literary canon and the feminist canon, challenging histories of feminism and queer studies to include the South in a formative role. 
