A BIT MORE:

Arielle Zibrak’s writing on literature, gender, sexuality, and popular culture has been praised by The New York Times, Longreads, PopMatters, Book Riot, and Bookforum. Her scholarship has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Arizona Quarterly, Criticism, The Edith Wharton Review, ESQ, J19, and Women’s Studies, and she’s contributed essays to The Baffler, LitHub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, and The Millions. Her humor writing has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Toast.

Originally from Newton, Massachusetts, after studying at the University of Rochester, she worked at Random House in New York, where she was an Assistant Editor of women’s fiction. She left publishing to pursue a Ph.D. in American Literature at Boston University and is now Professor of English at the University of Wyoming.

She is the author of two books, Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures (New York University Press, 2021) and Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024); as well as the editor of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Twelve Stories by American Women, a more inclusive update to their Four Stories volume, from Penguin Classics in 2025. Her streaming series,“A Literary Tour of the United States,” was released in July 2025 by the Great Courses Plus platform.

Her current book project, Wishing Ourselves Well: A History of Women’s Healing in the United States from New Thought to Can-Do Feminism, is under contract at Liveright/Norton. It tells the complicated history of the women trailblazers who pioneered the big business of alternative healing, from Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science) to Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham (a sexual pleasure activist and eugenicist).