Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces, Blue Crow Books, 2017, Final Girl Books, 2023. How do you build a life after failed dreams and missed opportunities? Kelly J. Baker finished her PhD in religion and imagined that she would end up in the tenure-track job for which she trained. She had done everything right: written […]
Published at Killing the Buddha on July 14, 2017: The Onster lost his Monsters. I lost my place in academia (or gave it up, really). Neither of us lost ourselves.
Published at Huffington Post on June 21, 2017: I used to hate waiting, but now, I wonder if waiting is where living resides. As we wait, lives begin, lives continue, and lives end. We wait beside each other for things to happen, things to fall apart, or for things to stumble along. We wait and […]
Published at Chronicle Vitae on July 6, 2017: Knowing when to walk away is a healthy habit. Some things aren’t worth the sacrifices. It’s good to figure out what those things are for you. For me, if I hadn’t quit my lecturer gig and left a dysfunctional department, I would have never become the writer and editor […]
Published at Chronicle Vitae on July 6, 2017: What I hope the book does, if it doesn’t do anything else, is let people know that it is OK to leave academia. Academic notions of success are remarkably narrow, and the world around us has more possibilities than we might think.
Published at Women in Higher Education on July 5, 2017: I started crying as I watched these fierce Amazons because it was only an ordinary Tuesday and I was already exhausted from being a woman in 2017. The fantasy of the matriarchy was so tempting. I found myself mourning a world that never existed but […]