It is with deep sadness we report that Rachel Blau Duplessis died at Penn Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia on September 2 of this year. DuPlessis served as a Journal of Modern Literature co-editor from 2005-2016, and stepped back to advisory editor in 2017.
A poet, editor, and scholar she earned a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from Columbia University. Her special interests were in modern and contemporary poetry, especially issues of gender, the long poem, and cultural poetics. She is one of the foremost critics of her generation, and her works of scholarship include Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (2012), Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work (2006), Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (2001), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990), H.D.: The Career of That Struggle (1986), and Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985). As editor, her books include The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990) and, with Susan Stanford Friedman, Signets: Reading H.D. (1990). With Peter Quartermain, she coedited The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (1999) and with Ann Snitow, The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation (1998; reprint 2007).
DuPlessis is one of the pioneers of feminist literary study, as essayist/scholar, as a long-time member of the collective that edited the journal Feminist Studies, and as an early contributor to analytic gender studies in the university. She was the founding editor and the scholarly and acquisitions editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s series in “Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics” and edited book series on poetry and poetics for the University of Alabama and Iowa presses.
DuPlessis’s major work as a poet is the long poem Drafts, which she began in 1986 and published the final installment of in 2012: Surge: Drafts 96-114. Other books in the project include The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011), Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (2010), Torques: Drafts 58-76 (2007), Drafts: Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, unnumbered: Précis (2004), and Drafts 1-38, Toll (2001). Her recent poetry publications include Secular Ex Votos (2026), Life in Handkerchiefs (2023), Daykeeping (2023), Poetic Realism (2020), Around the Day in 80 Worlds (2018), Numbers (2018), and Days and Works (2017). A full list of her publications is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Blau_DuPlessis.
A professor at Temple University for many years, DuPlessis retired in 2011. In 2012, she was a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Auckland. She has also held an appointment with the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and a residency at Bellagio sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.
DuPlessis’s many honors and awards include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize, Temple University’s Creative Achievement Award, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Fund for Poetry.
We invite JML readers to share a memory at https://peopleforever.com/p/rachel-blau-duplessis.
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