Arielle Zibrak is a writer, researcher, editor, and educator living in the Rocky Mountain West. Originally from Massachusetts, she moved to New York in 2003 to work at Random House, where she was an Assistant Editor of women’s fiction. She left publishing to pursue a Ph.D. in 19th-century American Literature at Boston University and is now Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wyoming.
Her writing on literature, gender, sexuality, and popular culture has been praised by The New York Times, Longreads, PopMatters, Book Riot, and Bookforum and published in American Literature, American Literary History, Arizona Quarterly, The Baffler, Criticism, The Edith Wharton Review, ESQ, J19, LitHub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Missouri Review, and Women’s Studies. Her humor writing has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Toast.
She is the author of 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, forthcoming from Penguin Classics in 2025.
She is currently at work on a 24-episode video streaming series for The Great Courses Plus called “A Literary Tour of the United States”
and two books: a public history of consumer feminism and new-age philosophy in America called The Image of Desire and a collection of research-based personal essays that examine how we process trauma both individually and collectively.
Representation: Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Agency