Marian Janssen

Marian Janssen was born in the Netherlands and became hooked on British literature when she was an au-pair in London. Back in the Netherlands, American poetry and criticism came to fascinate her even more. She published NOT AT ALL WHAT ONE IS USED TO: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ISABELLA GARDNER in 2010. Columnist Alex Beam in the Boston Globe thought it rivalled Geoffrey Wolff's Black Sun "as best-ever book about Bostonians Behaving Badly." Steven Gould Axelrod wrote: "Compellingly written, deeply researched, learned, lucid, funny, and wise, this book is more than a mesmerizing page-turner. It allows us to understand Gardner and her milieu with new specificity and insight. This is one of the very best biographies of a mid-twentieth century poet yet written." And Frank Kearful wrote in American Literary Scholarship that the biography should be made into a film starring Meryl Streep as Isabella Gardner with Johnny Depp as her lover Allen Tate. Marian is now writing the biography of feminist poet CAROLYN KIZER (1923-2014), who won the Pulitzer prize in 1984, and whose life spanned from the Northwest to North Carolina, from Pakistan to Paris. Kizer was a feminist pre-occupied with her own beauty and had lovers ranging from Abe Fortas, President Johnson's advisor, to a Pakistan companion, who lived in her basement. Kizer's life promises to be even more fascinating than Gardner's, and will be, simultaneously, a historical and cultural kaleidoscope of life in the 20th century.