About

As Professor and Chair of English at Azusa Pacific University, Windy Counsell Petrie works to reveal the connections between literary history and our present cultural challenges and to help students build resilience and virtue through reading and writing. Her new book, Templates for Authorship: American Women’s Literary Autobiography in the 1930s, examines the Depression-Era autobiographies of a dozen women writers in the context of their cultural, regional, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. As a specialist in autobiography, she is always focused on the lives behind the literature. As a Fulbright Scholar to Eastern Europe, she enjoyed spreading the word about the significant roles that women and minority authors have played in American literary history. She has published articles and reviews in a/b: Autobiography Studies, Literatura, American Writers, Christianity and Literature, and has contributed essays to the edited collections Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement, American Writers in Europe, and Postmodernism and Beyond. When she is not working, you will find her outside, either under a tree or in the water.