Cheryll Glotfelty
Born in Bozeman, Montana, to a family with roots in Black Angus cattle ranching, Cheryll Glotfelty nevertheless grew up a city kid in Silicon Valley in the suburbs of Palo Alto, California. There, on Ramona Street, childhood friends introduced her to two interests that would ultimately drive her career. One friend would call her up to ask, "Wanna read?" Another friend hauled Cheryll on backpack trips, where she developed a love of mountain-top vistas, granite boulders, and the smell of pine needles, along with an ability to "trudge on and endure the hardships." After flirting with meteorology and biochemistry, Cheryll earned a BA in English at the University of California, Davis. A summer bicycle trip through the Rocky Mountains-from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Jasper, Canada and west to Prince Rupert-concluded with a move to Gunnison, Colorado, elevation 7,700', where Cheryll earned her MA Heading east, she then pursued her PhD in English at Cornell University in upstate New York, graduating in 1990. At Cornell, Cheryll became feminized, postmodernized, and always already theorized. Alarmed by serious environmental problems at home and abroad, she became determined to unite her two major interests--literature and the environment. Feverish sleuth work in Cornell's outstanding library uncovered the work of dozens of literary scholars who had published books and articles on literature and landscape, literature and ecology, literature and the environment. Curiously, however, these scholars rarely cited one another's work, and this promising field exerted but minimal influence in literary studies, let alone in the world. Cheryll's first book, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), co-edited with Harold Fromm, showcased this work and proposed the term ecocriticism (coined in 1978 by William Rueckert) to name the field.
Cheryll had the good fortune to be hired by the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1990, as the nation's first professor of Literature and Environment. She and UNR colleagues Mike Branch and Scott Slovic were the founding officers of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and they established the UNR English Department's graduate program in Literature and Environment. Cheryll enjoys inventing new courses and has offered graduate seminars on Ecocriticism and Theory; Regionalism and Bioregionalism; Literature of the Wild; Representing the Other--Animals in Literature; Environmental Justice Literature and Theory; and Ecofeminism. Her commitment to teaching has been recognized with many teaching awards, including the CASE-Carnegie Professor of the Year Award for Nevada. Her publications include essays on Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, Susan Griffin, Willa Cather, Peter Berg, Ecocriticism, Nuclear Landscapes, Bioregionalism, Western American Literature, and Pedagogy.
Falling instantly in love with the Great Basin, and influenced by theories of bioregionalism and reinhabitation, Cheryll has dedicated herself in recent years to "digging in" and "giving back" to the region. Her edited collection, Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State (2008), is the first comprehensive anthology of Nevada literature. Its goal is to share the state's fascinating literary heritage with readers and to cultivate a love of place among residents. Her most recent book, co-edited with Tom Lynch and Karla Armbruster, is The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (2012). While she enjoys developing courses and supervising graduate student projects on a wide range of topics, her own research will likely focus on the American West, Bioregionalism, and Altered Landscapes in the coming years.
Cheryll is married to Steve Glotfelty; they live at "Scorpion Acres" and have, at last count, one daughter-Rosa--two horses, one donkey, two cats, two parakeets, and goldfish. They relish the annual round of seasonal outdoor activities that beckon in this land of mountains, desert, and sunshine.
Contact Information
Cheryll GlotfeltyEnglish Department
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, NV 89557
(775) 682-6395
glotfelty.at.unr.edu