Anna E. Clark

I’m writer, scholar, and critic interested in the ways we perform selfhood and interiority, and in the history of “voice” and critical authority in English and ELA education in the United States. My work considers topics ranging from the uses of first-person narration, to writing instruction in secondary schools, to character and subjectivity in the realist novel. My essays and reviews of contemporary fiction regularly appear in Alta and the Los Angeles Review of Books, while my academic work has been published in journals such as ELH and Victorian Review. In 2019, I edited a scholarly edition of the Wilkie Collins novella The Dead Alive for Broadview Press. I received a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where I studied the 19th-century novel. Originally from Boulder, Colorado (and thus terminally outdoorsy), I teach writing and literary studies in San Diego.


Recent Reviews and Essays

‘Dayswork’ v. ‘Cold People’
Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, 3.8.2024

Outsiders Only: D.J. Waldie’s ‘Holy Land’ and the Literary Tradition of Explaining California
Alta Journal, 1.11.2024

Hard-Boiled Hope in ‘Clark and Division’
Alta Journal, 8.10.2023

A Different Kind of Bildungsroman
Alta Journal, 1.26.2023

Empathy at a Distance
Alta Journal, 8.4.2022

Play and ‘The Argonauts’
Alta Journal, 4.28.2022

The Saddest Stories Ever: On Sigrid Nunez’s ‘What Are You Going Through’
Los Angeles Review of Books, 10.26.2020

Twilight of the Mentors
The New Inquiry, 5.19.2020

Quarantine Journal: Old Feelings
The Point, 5.17.2020

Love and Parents in Crissy Van Meter’s ‘Creatures’
Los Angeles Review of Books, 1.29.2020

Hybrid Noir: On Anita Felicelli’s ‘Chimerica’
Los Angeles Review of Books, 9.26.2019

Damaged Intimacies: Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’
Los Angeles Review of Books, 3.25.2019

 Contact

Email: annaeclark@gmail.com