Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers; Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination
Nancy McCampbell Grace (born January 31, 1952) is the Virginia Myers Professor of English at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, where she has taught since 1987.[1] She is a specialist in the Beat Generation,[2] with her research specifically on Jack Kerouac and women artists associated with the Beat movement.
Grace is known as an established U.S. authority on [clarification needed]. She has also written on Interdisciplinarity and women's studies.
Steven Belletto featured Grace in his article “Jack Kerouac, Sophistacte,” writing that Grace's work on Kerouac “demonstrated that the writing’s seemingly simple surfaces conceal much more complex formal structures and aesthetic theories.[4] Raven J. See covered Grace’s Breaking the Rule of Cool in her article “Fashion and Female Beat Identity in the Writing of di Prima, Johnson, and Jones. See wrote, “As Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace discuss in Breaking the Rule of Cool: ‘Women Beat writers dissented from gender assumptions of Beat and mainstream cultures; making their own use of the Beat aesthetics and culture by which they were colonized, they developed a subaltern's recourse, the art of being in between’ (21). As Johnson and Grace have illustrated, Beat women are a marginalized group within a marginalized subculture and they must doubly contend with the misogyny of the culture writ large but also within Bohemia.”[5] In 2002, Grace and her research partner Ronna C. Johnson co-edited Girls Who Wore Black, which Isabel Castelao-Gómez referred to as “the first edited volume on Beat women writers with articles that bring academic emphasis on their two major genres: life and poetry.”[6]
Von Vogt, Liz. 681 Lexington Avenue: A Beat Education in New York City 1947-1954, edited and published by Nancy M. Grace. Greater Midwest Publishing, 2008. ISBN1590983017
Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers, with Ronna C. Johnson. University Press of Mississippi, 2004.ISBN1578066549