Karen Ford is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. A former student of Cary Nelson, Ford is a leading commentator on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry with specialties in women’s literature and African American literature. She is the author of Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer & The Poetics of Modernity ( Alabama, 2005) and Gender and the Poetics of Excess: Moments of Brocade ( Mississippi, 1997).