Critic and scholar, poet and essayist with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis is professor emerita at Temple University. She is author of Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Purple Passages completes this feminist trilogy of essays on poetry and poetics. Among her numerous other books are Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, H.D.: The Career of That Struggle, and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934. Since 1986, DuPlessis has been engaged in a long poem project, collected in several book-length installments.