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Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Goodreads Author

Born

in San Francisco, The United States

Website

http://www.irisjamahldunkle.com

Twitter

irjohnso

Genre

Biography, Poetry

Member Since

November 2008

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet. Her academic and creative work challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and over-population have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history by researching the lives of women. She obtained her MFA in poetry from New York University, and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University.

Dunkle’s West : Fire : Archive is a poetry collection that challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography, and history fueled by the Western myth of progress presented Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet. Her academic and creative work challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and over-population have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history by researching the lives of women. She obtained her MFA in poetry from New York University, and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University.

Dunkle’s West : Fire : Archive is a poetry collection that challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography, and history fueled by the Western myth of progress presented in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis.” Each section is presented as if it is an archival box filled with artifacts, the first of which opens to the maligned life of Charmian Kittredge London the wife of the famous author Jack London. The poems unstitch and resew her life, invigorating the old narrative with her forgotten attributes: her disregard of gender norms, her pioneer heritage, and her sense of adventure. The second archival box examines the act of autobiography. In it, Dunkle writes through the complex grief of losing her mother and her community when it is devastated by wildfires and reflects on how these disasters echo the one that brought her family to California, the Dust Bowl. The final archival box questions the authenticity of the definition of recorded history as it relates to the American West.

In 2020, her biography on Charmian Kittredge London, Jack London's wife, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press. It’s a work that questions and rewrites the narrative presented of Jack and Charmian London by fictional biographers like Irving Stone by recreating Charmian's life through her perspective. Dunkle believes that biography can be revolutionary; it can challenge established ideas that have been fixed in history and through careful research resurrect the lives of those who have been misremembered. Charmian Kittredge London was a New Woman, an author, and an adventurer whose accomplishments (and disruptions) history had all but forgotten. Prominent Jack London scholar and author of Jack London: An American Life Earle Labor called Dunkle’s work “essential reading” and claimed that it was the “biography Charmian would have wanted to have written about her life.” Jack London Scholar, Jonah Raskin called the book "riveting. . . . This biography sets the record as straight as it can be straightened. . . . Despite her flaws, or perhaps because of them, Charmian is indeed the kind of woman whom one would love to have known.”

Dunkle lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. ...more

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle's Blog

Follow Along as I Write My Next Biography!

Hi Everyone -

If you enjoyed reading my biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer you might be interested in my next project!

I'm currently writing a biography on the amazing author, Sanora Babb .

Since 2004 when her novel Whose Names Are Unknown: A Novel was finally published to much critical acclaim, Babb’s steady rise to be recognized as one of the West’s most gifted Read more of this blog post »

1 like · Like • 1 comment • flag

Published on January 18, 2022 17:19 • Tags: iris-jamahl-dunkle, sanora-babb

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s books

Average rating: 4.24 · 317 ratings · 59 reviews · 11 distinct works • Similar authors

	Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb 4.18 avg rating — 187 ratings — published 2024 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer 4.23 avg rating — 74 ratings — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Gold Passage 4.75 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 2013	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	West : Fire : Archive (Mountain West Poetry Series) 4.42 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 2021 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air 4.50 avg rating — 10 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Interrupted Geographies 4.50 avg rating — 10 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Inheritance 4.80 avg rating — 5 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Sugar House Review #5: Fall/Winter '11 by Kevin Cutrer (Contributor), Star Coulbrooke (Contributor), Sandra Kohler (Contributor) 3.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2011	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Orion Magazine: At the Edge of the Sacred by Sandra Cisneros (contributor), Ross Gay (contributor), Sujatha Fernandes (contributor) it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Flying Trolley 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Victorian Sappho

by Yopie Prins

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Aug 24, 2008 09:17PM

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The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

by Erik Larson (Goodreads Author)

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Mar 09, 2015 12:41AM

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Book Of Jack London, The (2 Volumes)

by Charmian London

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Oct 20, 2018 09:28AM

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Iris Dunkle rated a book it was amazing SLIP by Nicole Callihan (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Read this incredible new collection of poetry by Nicole Callihan!
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Quotes by Iris Jamahl Dunkle (?)

“History is like soil: you must turn it over, till it, to find the other hidden stories underneath. When we do so we find a fuller, richer story, one that is more representative of the whole of human experience. One that Sanora Babb was a master at telling.”
― Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb

tags: hidden-stories, history, other-perspectives, unattributed-work-of-women

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