AMY BILLONE is a scholar and a poet who has published widely in both academic and creative journals and books. She holds a B.A. in General Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.
Billone’s new book The Future of the Nineteenth-Century Dream-Child: Fantasy, Dystopia, Cyberculture may be purchased as an eBook or ordered by your library from Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture Series. The book discusses the reappearance of the nineteenth-century dream-child from Bronte’s Catherine Earnshaw/Linton to Carroll’s Alice to Barrie’s Peter Pan in Rowling’s Harry Potter, Tim Burton’s Alice, Michael Jackson, James Bond, Meyer’s Twilight series, James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and Collins’s The Hunger Games series.
Her book Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2007) is informed by her unique perspective as a woman poet. As the only extended study of nineteenth-century female sonneteers, Little Songs sheds light on the overwhelming impact that silence makes, not only on British women’s poetry, but also on the development of modern poetry and thought. She also wrote the Introduction and Notes for the Barnes and Noble Classics edition of Peter Pan (2005).
Billone’s poetry collection The Light Changes (2013) earned a Starred Kirkus Review and was chosen by Kirkus as one of the Best Books of 2013. The book won the IndieReader Discovery Award in Poetry in 2014. The Light Changes invokes the biographical and creative worlds of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf as it opens up pathways toward light even in the most unimaginable darkness of our personal experiences and the times we inhabit today.
Billone has forthcoming a series of books of Midnight Haiku (inspired by her work on The Future of the Nineteenth-Century Dream-Child). She has been sharing the process of writing these poems on Twitter and on Instagram.
Currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Billone teaches courses on 19th Century Literature, Children’s and Young Adult Literature and World Literature. Her areas of expertise include Romanticism, Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Victorian Poetry, Gothic Studies, Creative Writing, Women Writers and Continental Poetry. She lives with her two sons in Knoxville, Tennessee.
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