Carol Polsgrove

Biography

Carol Polsgrove is the author of three publishing histories, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 1995), Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (W.W. Norton, 2001), Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause (Manchester University Press, 2009), and a memoir, When We Were Young in Africa: 1948-1960 (Culicidae Press, 2015). She served on the advisory board for the Library of America’s two-volume anthology, Reporting Civil Rights (2003) and contributed two essays to The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, Volume 5 of A History of the Book in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Recent publications include a review of Robert Vitalis. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations, The American Historical Review 2016, 121 (3): 962-963,

Before she joined the IU faculty, Polsgrove was an editor at Mother Jones and the Progressive magazines. She has written for Sierra, the Nation, Counterpunch, Huffington Post, the American Prospect, and other magazines and newspapers, and continues to publish reporting and opinion pieces. She has also joined with co-translator Paloma Fernández Sánchez to translate work by Latin American writers; these translations have appeared in the University of Iowa’s Exchanges Literary Journal, CounterPunch, Literal Magazine, and their own website, http://latinamericanwriters.com. Polsgrove also interviews writers for her website, http://carolpolsgrove.com.

She holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Louisville and an M.A. from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Before joining the Indiana University journalism faculty, she taught at state universities in Kentucky and California. Courses she taught at IU (1989-2008) included literary journalism, public affairs reporting, magazine writing and editing, and journalism history. She was twice winner of the School of Journalism’s Gretchen Kemp Teaching Award.

She now resides in Charlotte, N.C., with occasional stretches of study in Costa Rica and Mexico.