Kay L. Retzlaff

Dr. Kay Retzlaff, professor of English, has taught literature, writing, and women’s studies at UMA since 1994. She regularly teaches Introduction to Literature, Introduction to Mythology, Irish-American Literature, Native American Literature, American Literature through the Civil War, American Literature since the Civil War, Myth and Fantasy, Creative Writing, Professional Writing, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies courses. She volunteers as a teacher for Penobscot Valley Senior College. Her research interests include Irish and northern European myth, Irish literature, women in mythology and religion, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers, especially Benjamin Franklin and Edgar Allan Poe.

Her most recent publication is Duet, a collection of poems in collaboration with artist Susan Camp’s photographs. Her poems have appeared in Plainsong, Potato Eyes, The Prompt, Common Ground Review, Feile-Feste, and Theories of Her: An Experimental Anthology.

She published Redefining Irishness in a Coastal Maine City, 1770-1870: Bridget’s Belfast (Routledge 2022), a social history of Irish immigrants in Belfast, Maine. The journal Maine History published “Belfast Maine: Irish Identity and Acceptance in a Small City on Penobscot Bay.” Maine History (2017).

Her book review essay on three Ireland into Film offerings from Cork University Press appeared in the Celtic Studies Association of North America newsletter. Her article on the Táin was published in Ulidia 2. She is also the author of two books on mythology: Ireland: Its Myths and Legends (Friedman 1998) and Women of Mythology (Friedman 1999). She edited Vietnam Memories: A Cookbook, by Bich Nga Burrill.

She was invited to teach literature of the American Civil War at the International Summer School, Chonnam National University, Kwangju, Republic of Korea, summer 2015. She studied Old Irish at National University of Ireland-Galway in 2011.