Jordan Von Cannon

Genevieve Taggard: Poet/Feminist/Activist/Teacher

Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal Special Issue

Guest Editor:

Nancy Berke, City University of New York—LaGuardia


In 2025 the Women Writing Women’s Lives Biography Seminar affiliated with the Graduate Center of the City University of New York hosted a panel on the American poet Genevieve Taggard (1894-1947). Inspired in part by the publication of Anne Hammond’s hybrid biography/selected works, To Test the Joy (Boiler House Books, 2023), the panel re-introduced a remarkable twentieth century socialist and feminist writer and public intellectual, who left a legacy of literary and social activism through a prolific and varied poetic and social practice in the first half of the twentieth century.

Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is devoting a special issue to Genevieve Taggard, her career and legacy. Given the interdisciplinary nature of Women’s Studies, and the breadth and depth of Taggard’s multi-faceted artistic, cultural, and political undertakings, proposals are sought for essays that demonstrate Taggard’s wide-ranging literary and political legacy and her significance to our present moment.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • Taggard’s poetry and its influences/confluences
  • Taggard in/and the “little” magazines
  • Taggard as editor and anthologist
  • Taggard in intertextual dialogue with other poets and writers
  • Taggard’s collaborations with other artists (i.e composers, photographers)
  • Taggard and the critics
  • Taggard’s archives
  • Taggard’s correspondences
  • Taggard and Greenwich Village bohemia
  • Taggard and feminism
  • Taggard and Hawaii/California
  • Taggard and Vermont/New England
  • Taggard and the lyrical Left
  • Taggard, the Popular Front, and/or other political contexts.
  • Taggard as teacher and biographer
  • Taggard and the political economy of nature (eco-feminism; eco-criticism)
  • Rereading/Reclaiming Taggard in the 21st Century

Submission Instructions


Please send abstracts of around 300 words and a short bio to this special issue’s editor, Nancy Berke, Professor Emerita of English, City University of New York, LaGuardia (nancyberke@yahoo.com) by January 15, 2026. Selected contributors will be notified in February 2026, and completed articles of 6500 to 8000 words will be due by September 2026.