Karen Kilcup is professor of American literature, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Named a U.S. National Distinguished Teacher in 1987, she was recently the Davidson Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida International University. She is the editor of Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (University of Iowa, 1999) and Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology and the author of Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition.