Jo Radner

This month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs, host Peter Neill sits down with Joan (Jo) Radner, of Lovell, Maine, professor emerita of literature at American University, holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and is enjoying a second career as an oral historian, writer, and professional storyteller in her family’s home region of western Maine. Jo has been studying, teaching, telling, and collecting stories most of her life, and has performed from Maine to Hawaii to Finland. Past president of the American Folklore Society and the National Storytelling Network, she has published books and articles on subjects ranging from early Irish historiography and Anglo-Irish drama to women’s folklore, Deaf culture, and New England social history. Her new book (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023) is Wit and Wisdom: The Forgotten Literary Life of New England Villages. She has also published two award-winning CDs grounded in New England history, Yankee Ingenuity: Stories of Headstrong and Resourceful People and Burnt Into Memory: How Brownfield Faced the Fire