Mary Sisney

Mary Sisney is a retired English professor, currently living in Claremont, California, happy no longer to be grading papers and essays but still trying to teach whenever she can. She taught her last class, an American Literature seminar at Cal Poly Pomona, on June 4, 2009, the thirtieth anniversary of her dissertation defense at the University of Southern California. In her published memoir, A Redlight Woman Who Knows How to Sing the Blues (2013), Sisney teaches her readers the importance of diversity in the academy. She shows how differently a dark-skinned black woman, born and raised in Kentucky during the last days of Jim Crow, views not only departmental conflicts but also language and texts. She was famous--perhaps infamous--for her "racial reading" of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. In addition to her memoir, Mary Sisney's publications include a humorous self-help book The Bronze Rule (2014), in which she creates a not so golden rule that we should all try to live by: “Mind Your Business,” and Good and Bad Politics (2026), a collection of Goodreads blogs focused on politics.