I’m writer, scholar, teacher, and critic interested in the novel’s engagement with interiority and self, in portrayals of landscape in fiction, and in the history of literary education. I’m currently at work on two projects. First, a novel, tentatively titled Retreat, a revisionist Western about an idealistic attempt at off-the-grid living at the height of the Covid pandemic, and second, a history of the essay in American education—as an assessment tool, a means of subject formation, and a lingua franca of humanistic learning that is fast disappearing in the age of ubiquitous AI.
My essays and reviews of contemporary fiction regularly appear in Alta and the Los Angeles Review of Books, while my academic work has been published in journals such as ELH and Victorian Review. In 2019, I edited a scholarly edition of the Wilkie Collins novella The Dead Alive for Broadview Press. I received a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where I studied narratology and the 19th-century novel. Originally from Boulder, Colorado (and thus terminally outdoorsy), I teach writing and literary studies in San Diego, California, where I live with my husband, our garden, and a very large cat.
Recent Reviews and Essays
Don’t Ask Why: Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy
Alta Online, 4.28.25
Play it As It Lays: 25 Books That Define California
Alta, Issue 31, 3.24.25
Cerebral Passions in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
Alta, California Book Club, 1.16.25
That Old Story: In The Ancients, John Larison makes a case for the long view
Alta Online, 11.11.24
Suspended Animation: In Miranda July’s novel All Fours, cliché becomes a catalyst for possibility
Alta Online, 5.27.24
Dayswork v. Cold People
Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, 3.8.2024
Outsiders Only: D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land and the Literary Tradition of Explaining California
Alta, California Book Club, 1.11.2024
Hard-Boiled Hope in Clark and Division
Alta, California Book Club, 8.10.2023
A Different Kind of Bildungsroman
Alta, California Book Club, 1.26.2023
Empathy at a Distance
Alta, California Book Club, 8.4.2022
Play and The Argonauts
Alta, California Book Club, 4.28.2022
The Saddest Stories Ever: On Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through
Los Angeles Review of Books, 10.26.2020
Twilight of the Mentors
The New Inquiry, 5.19.2020
Quarantine Journal: Old Feelings
The Point, 5.17.2020
Love and Parents in Crissy Van Meter’s Creatures
Los Angeles Review of Books, 1.29.2020
Hybrid Noir: On Anita Felicelli’s Chimerica
Los Angeles Review of Books, 9.26.2019
Damaged Intimacies: Sally Rooney’s Normal People
Los Angeles Review of Books, 3.25.2019
Contact
Email: annaeclark@gmail.com