Women's Studies

Genevieve Taggard: Poet/Feminist/Activist/Teacher

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 (1894-1948). 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. Given the breadth and depth of this author'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