Professor Rowena Kennedy-Epstein has been awarded the Modern Language Association's prestigious Prize for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship for her monograph The Muriel Rukeyser Era (Cornell UP, 2023), co-edited with Eric Keenaghan.

The committee's citation for Keenaghan and Kennedy-Epstein reads:

Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein make available much of Muriel Rukeyser’s short prose for the first time since it was originally published. The contents of The Muriel Rukeyser Era range from lectures on poetry to radio scripts, from early student writing in the magazine Rukeyser cofounded at nineteen years old to three major essays from the last decade of her life, and from essays about the beginning of the Spanish Civil War to reviews of her contemporaries’ poetry. The editors preface Rukeyser’s writing with a provocative question—“What would have happened if a Jewish, radical, bisexual, single mother had been the defining voice of postwar American poetry?”—and provide evidence that our understanding of the era should be rethought. 

The prize will be presented at the MLA 2025 Convention in New Orleans. You can find out more about Professor Kennedy-Epstein's research and teaching here.