Panthea Reid is Professor Emerita of English at LSU. After long teaching careers there, she and her husband, John Irwin Fischer, left Louisiana for Princeton, NJ, in 2001. There they pursued their several scholarly projects until Fischer died in May, 2015. A year later, Reid moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, to be close to her son and grandson and not too far away from her daughter in DC. In 2017, Wild River Books published her memoir and the University of Delaware Press published the book she finished for her late husband.

Reid is the author of four books and the editor of three. Her authored books are: William Faulkner: The Abstract and the Actual; Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf; Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles; and Body and Soul: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Healing, written after Fischer’s death. She has edited collections of essays on Walker Percy and Ellen Douglas. In 2017, she completed for Fischer and his co-editor A. C. Elias, Jr., Jonathan Swift’s Word-Book: A Vocabulary Compiled for Esther Johnson and Copied in Her Own Hand. It is Swift’s, Elias’s, and Fischer’s last book. Reid’s memoir, Body and Soul, is a touching, often amusing, love story, a poignant tale of loss, a searing warning about medical incompetence, and an inspiring account of recovery. Reid accompanies it with useful citations and practical advice on surviving loss.

Reid has written for DoubleTake Magazine and The Princeton Magazine. Reid’s article on surviving a concussion “How I (Almost) Lost My Mind” is available at Newsweek online.

Her first published poem will appear in Artemis Journal in the spring of 2018. She will be a featured panelist in a session on memoirs at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, 23 March 2018.