Deborah Martinson

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Deborah Martinson writes the lives of complicated women--creative, sexual and political. Women who live with humor, passion and edge make history. And they make it dramatically. With a PhD in literature focused on autobiography and fiction, Martinson writes and teaches the hows and the whys of living and writing. Martinson is just finishing Virginia Durr: Southern Radical Come Hell or High Water. Durr changed from belle to New Dealer, to civil rights hell raiser. Courageously. The Durr biography follows Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (2005, pb. 2011). Martinson's first book, In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction (2003) focused on Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Violet Hunt and Doris Lessing. Martinson is Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Occidental College, and has taught biography as at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts.