Heads or Tales: The Fate of Poe’s Female Storytellers Available to Purchase

SUSAN ELIZABETH SWEENEY is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross. She coedited Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism and has published essays on Poe’s tales, their relationship to nineteenth-century visual and aural culture, and their influence on other writers. The Raven Woos the Dove, her original screenplay, recounts Poe’s courtship of Sarah Helen Whitman. Beth is a past president of the PSA, helped to organize three international PSA conferences, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Poe Studies and the Edgar Allan Poe Review. She has twice received the James W. Gargano Award for an outstanding essay on Poe—for “The Horror of Taking a Picture in Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart’” and “Echoes of Ventriloquism in Poe’s Tales”—and is an honorary member of the PSA. At Holy Cross, Beth was the second recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award for an exceptional record of scholarship. Recent books include Hand Me Down, a collection of poems, and Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction, a coedited volume. In 2023, her song cycle Close and Apart—written for adaptation by composer Matthew Jaskot—was performed by soprano, baritone, and small chamber group in its world premiere.