Alissa Wilkinson
Alissa Wilkinson founded The Curator in 2008 and was its editor for two years until accepting a full-time faculty position at The King's College. She is also associate editor of Comment. Her work on pop culture, philosophy, politics, and fine art has appears in a number of publications, including Paste, Christianity Today, Prism, Patrol, WORLD, and Relevant.
Alissa harbors a not-so-secret obsession with cooking, farmer’s markets, and food policy; reads a lot of books; drinks a lot of herbal tea; and watches movies with her husband, Tom, in their tiny apartment high above the Brooklyn treetops.
From the Guardian: Off the page: fashion in literature. As a book-obsessed suburban adolescent, Iread Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and the fantastical neogothic fiction of Angela Carter, and attempted to cultivate the dress and persona of a woman who drank her coffee black and her scotch straight. Iwanted to hang out with artists and go [...]
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From the Wall Street Journal: They’re no bodice rippers, but Amish romances are hot. Beverly Lewis, who sets her novels among the Amish in Pennsylvania, has sold 13.5 million copies of her books. Wanda Brunstetter’s novels take place in Amish communities in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania, and have sold more than four million copies. [...]
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From the Guardian: Too much stuff. I’m fairly certain I recently passed a rather pathetic tipping point, and now own more unread books and unwatched DVDs than my remaining lifespan will be able to sustain. I can’t possibly read all these pages, watch all these movies, before the grim reaper comes knocking. The bastard things [...]
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From Newsweek: Celebrating Good Hair. The relationship between black women and their hair goes well beyond the occasional bad hair day. It’s about race, politics, and the expectations of women to conform to a certain standard. It’s a great film, and one that teases out (no pun intended) the complex business of having hair that [...]
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From BBC News: What does your bookcase say about you? It has held books upright in millions of rooms around the world for 30 years. As Ikea’s Billy bookcase enters its fourth decade, why do we display our reading material rather than just store it away?
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From MediaPost: on why Harper’s is still a great magazine. It’s really quite stunning to contemplate the vast choices you’re offered for $6.95 at an airport newsstand. Of course, when it comes to gravitas that separates a magazine from the pack, Harper’s offers plenty. For starters, it’s been in print since 1850 (the year Zachary [...]
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From More Intelligent Life: Time for a Spark Revival. Despite her many awards, her damehood and her distinguished champions-Evelyn Waugh saw her as a writer “whom people rejoice to introduce to their friends”-Muriel Spark remains outside the highest literary firmament. Her poet’s ear makes her books deceptively slight: they deal with life and death, God [...]
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From More Intelligent Life: Last Days of the Polymath. The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leo¬≠nardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a brainy actor, writer, director and TV personality, it is at once presumptuous and banal. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it. “Nowadays people that [...]
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From the New York Times: Why Good Writers Can Be Bad Conversationalists. Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make [...]
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From the Times Higher Education: The Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy. When the historian David Starkey left the University of Cambridge in 1972, he told an interviewer that he “knew exactly how an ingrowing toenail felt”. There was something deeply dispiriting, he said, about “the sense of introversion, of knowing everyone”. The inward-looking, incestuous [...]
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