
Gail Turley Houston
GAIL TURLEY HOUSTON {[email protected]} is a professor in the English Department at the University of New Mexico. She has published four books and numerous articles on the Victorian period and is now focusing on Charlotte Brontë and a little known early nineteenth-century radical named Eliza Sharples.
Mother, May We? | Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, and Martin Pulido, eds., Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry
Articles/Essays – Volume 51, No. 3
She is willful. She is in the other room. She is “the feminine / present subjunctive.” She is “tessellating.” She is “throneless, / wanders.” She is “queen of heaven.” She is a “Heavenly Hausfrau.” She is “Medusa in the kingdom.” She is the “Pillar of Womanhood.” She is “executrix.” She is a “mahogany” woman. She is “the Holy Soul.” She is.
Read moreWhen Did You Become Black?
Articles/Essays – Volume 51, No. 3
Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 193–200
After taking a genelogy DNA test, Houston finds some African ancestory. “Where to begin in answering all those questions? But at the most basic level, I simply liked that I was from Africa. The percentage was small but the jolt large and wondrous. In the nineteenth century, the United States had the one-drop rule about race: if you had one drop of African blood you were considered to be Black.”
Dreaming After Trump
Articles/Essays – Volume 50, No. 2
On November 9, 2016, I remained in bed all day. The previous evening— what F. Scott Fitzgerald might have referred to as the “real dark night of the soul”—I had broken all the speed limits…
Read moreRestless Grace | Terry Tempest Williams, Leap
Articles/Essays – Volume 33, No. 3
I first met Terry Tempest Williams in January 1999 at a commemoration in Tucson, Arizona, for my uncle, United States Representative Morris Udall. The beautiful eulogies honoring his many accomplishments, particularly his record on the…
Read moreMy Belief
Articles/Essays – Volume 38, No. 4
In 1831 at the same time that Joseph Smith was receiving visions and establishing a new church because no contemporary religion was true—they had all become dead relics with no prophecy in them—Scottish writer Thomas…
Read more