Nadya Aisenberg (1928–1999)

Nadya Aisenberg was born in New York City and graduated from Bennington College. She earned a doctorate in English literature at the University of Wisconsin. She was a committed feminist who published two books on feminism, Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove (1988, co-authored with Mona Harrington) and Ordinary Heroines: Transforming the Male Myth (1994). She also published A Common Spring: Crime Novel and Classic (1980), a critical study of crime fiction, and We Animals: Poems of Our World. In her career, she published poetry and literary criticism in nearly equal parts. She taught women’s studies at Brandeis University, and English at Tufts University, Wellesley College, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In the 1980s, she cofounded Rowan Tree Press, which published 30 titles. She was also a cofounder of the Cambridge Alliance of Independent Scholars and was on the Board of Directors of the Writers’ Room of Boston.