gwendolyn spring kurtz
School: University of Tennessee- Chattanooga Member of:
University of Tennessee- Chattanooga Sometimes academic Gwendolyn Spring Kurtz spent years thinking, teaching, and wandering about the West Coast and its diverse and sundry borders. She explored those borders as Editor-in-Chief of pacific REVIEW, A West Coast Arts Review Annual, where she published writing and art that blur linguistic, political, geographic, and social boundaries. Having flirted with la frontera on paper, she crossed into Mexico, where she experienced the pace of a small town, the arts and artifacts of Mexico City, and the politics and people of Oaxaca and Chiapas. Her publications, like her studies, ground her active academic interests in lived experience: “Todo Hombre: Testing the Mettle of Man, Machismo, and Marianismo in Oliver Mayer’s Blade to the Heat” traces sexuality and gender performance from Mexico through contemporary Latina/o theatre (included in Bordered Sexualities: Bodies on the Verge of a Nation, forthcoming from SDSU Press). Her musings on critical theory and the culture of the ivory tower, “Notes on Leaving the Academy,” appear in Crate: A Journal of Literary Borders and Boundaries (2005). She makes her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she teaches and continues to wonder at the humanities and what it is to be human. Send her answers at spring-kurtz@utc.edu.
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