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  • Contributors

Authors

Katie O. Arosteguy teaches at Sacramento City College. Her dissertation, titled "The Clothes Do Make the Woman: The Politics of Fashioning Femininity in Contemporary American Chick Lit," argues that the Chick Lit genre provides fertile ground for examining tensions in contemporary gender relations and the anxiety women feel about navigating dominant ideologies of white femininity. Her essay "The Politics of Race and Class in Contemporary American Mommy Lit" is forthcoming in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. "'Things Men Must Do': Negotiating American Masculinity in Jack London's The Valley of the Moon" was published in Atenea: A Bilingual Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences in June 2008.

Andrew Menard lives in New York City. A former conceptual artist, he now writes about the nineteenth-century American landscape, with an emphasis on the West. Other essays are due to appear in the Journal of American Studies and The New England Quarterly. He has just finished a book on John Frémont's first expedition to the Rocky Mountains.

Kirsten Møllegaard teaches courses in English Studies and Women's Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo. Her current research focuses on the intersection of landscape, gender, and nation in film and literature of the American West and the West of Ireland.

Artists

Julie Bozzi (b. 1943) challenges the Hudson River School's depiction of the United States as majestic and picturesque in her landscape paintings. Her paintings reveal the isolation found within Texas. Bozzi is especially attracted to the more macabre aspects of the Texas myth: the grassy knoll where President John F. Kennedy died or the field outside Waco where the Branch Davidian standoff occurred. Although her paintings lack people, her landscapes show what may have happened in a place outside of the viewer's gaze.

Delmas Howe was born in 1935 in El Paso, Texas, and raised in Truth or Consequences, then Hot Springs, New Mexico. His family's friends were ranch people—many of them working cowboys. After studying art at the Art Students League and bassoon in New York City, he realized that he did not fit too well in the New York scene and longed to return to his [End Page 222] roots in the Southwest. On returning to the region, he developed a career in easel painting in the 1970s. He has won many awards, including the Governor's Award in New Mexico and a Life Achievement Award from the Leslie Lohman Foundation, a group devoted to preserving art considered taboo, in New York City. He still lives in Truth or Consequences and paints and draws every day that he can.

Craig Irvin (b. 1948) is an artist living in Texas. Originally a singer-songwriter and professional musician, he turned to painting in 2001 and now devotes himself to it full-time. Self-taught and intuitive in process, he was highly influenced by artists such as Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and Francisco Toledo. His work can be found at www.craigirvin.com.

Leon Kroll (1884–1974) was a skilled painter, art teacher, and critic. Born in New York to a musical family, Kroll knew he wanted to be an artist from an early age. He studied under American Impressionist John Henry Twachtman and Jean-Paul Laurens as he traveled to places such as New York, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and France. In 1910, he returned to New York and was introduced to George Bellows and Eugene Speicher, both of whom shared his interest in paintings that captured the marvelous regularity of everyday life. He traveled to Santa Fe in 1917 in order to visit fellow Ashcan School painters Bellows and Robert Henri. There, he painted Santa Fe Hills, featured with Menard's essay on p. 183. Of the painting, Kroll wrote, "The painting is unique in a way. At least as far as I am concerned. It is the only major work done in Santa Fe (what a beautiful city)" (qtd. in Edna Robertson and Sarah Nestor, Artists of the Canyons & Caminos: Santa Fe: Early Twentieth Century [2006], 51).

Jon Langford (b. 1957) is a founding member of the legendary British rock band the Mekons. A native of...

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