Cathryn Halverson Wins Book Award From the Western Literature Association

Cathryn Halverson, assistant professor of English at Minot State University in North Dakota, received the Thomas J. Lyon Award from The Western Literature Association. Dr. Halverson was honored for her book Faraway Women and The Atlantic Monthly (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019). In conducting research for her first two books, Dr. Halverson found that many women writers in the American West had published in the Atlantic Monthly. So she decided to examine this connection in detail for her third book.

The awards committee stated that “combining scholarly rigor with an engaging and entertaining rhetorical style, Faraway Women complicates how we think about the relationships among regionalism, the vernacular, and modernity; the intersections of genre, gender, agency, and power; and the raced, classed, and gendered politics of literary form and critical practice. She deftly negotiates between her significant archival work and the published texts, all with a powerful and often humorous voice. This book offers readers the work of a scholar at the top of her game.”

Dr. Halverson joined the faculty at Minot State Univerity in 2018. She taught for many years as an associate professor of English at a small liberal arts college in Kobe, Japan, and as an associate professor of American studies at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Dr. Halverson is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.