BARBARA CLAIRE FREEMAN is a literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (University of California Press), among many other works of literary theory and criticism. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing and poetics in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley. Incivilities, her first collection of poems, was published by Counterpath Press in 2009; a chapbook, St. Ursula's Silence, published by Instance Press in 2010. Selections from these collections won the Boston Review/Discovery Prize and the Campbell Corner Prize (Sarah Lawrence College).