Melanie Benson Taylor

Melanie Benson Taylor is an associate professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, working at the intersections of Native and U.S. Southern literature and culture. She is the author of Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912–2002 (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (University of Georgia Press, 2012), as well as essays on William Faulkner, Louis Owens, Barry Hannah, Dawn Karima Pettigrew, and others. Her current book projects include Indian Killers, an exploration of violence in contemporary American literature by and about Native peoples, and Faulkner’s Doom, a study of Faulkner’s Indian characters as refractions of economic anxiety in the modern South. A native of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, she currently lives in central New Hampshire with her husband, a real Southerner from Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Ten Things I Can’t Do Without

1. My  husband
2. My families (both Northern and Southern)
3. A cat affixed to some part of my body every night
4. Polly and Pearl (see #3)
5. An electric blanket, on High, 11/12ths of the year (sorry, #1!)
6. Lip balm
7. The ocean
8. The google
9. Worry, unfortunately
10. Coffee, apparently
11. A #11 (Mr. Faulkner, of course)