Elizabeth Horan

Elizabeth Horan has authored, edited and translated ten books in the Literature of the Americas. Her primary research focus has been on how women writers in the Americas have gained access to print and have come to represent the Americas nationally and internationally. Professor Horan's current and most recent work is a literary biography in three volumes that draw from traditional and digital archives in English and Spanish, archives that she assisted in organizing and transferring from the US to Chile. Her work has been supported with grants and prizes from the Organization of American States, the US State Department Fulbright program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has also held writing residencies in Spain and New York. At ASU, Horan develops and teaches online and immersion courses in "American" Literature to Reconstruction, World War II Literature, the Literature of Nobel Laureates and Espionage Fiction and Film. She served a term as English Department Chair (2002-2004).

Horan's extensive biography of Gabriela Mistral, a queer, mixed-race poet, educator, journalist and diplomat who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1945) is being published in Spanish in three volumes. The first volume of Mistral una vida (Mistral, a Life, published by Penguin Random, 2023) moves from the poet's birth in a remote corner of the Chilean Andes in 1889, to her early and lasting international fame as a startlingly original poet, an enterprising journalist, a pioneering educator and a savvy diplomat. Volume 2, about the poet's life and work with the Mexican diplomat Palma Guillén, will appear in 2024. The final volume, on the poet's life and work during World War II and the Cold War, will appear in 2025.