Diane Middlebrook
Diane Helen Middlebrook ( Wood; April 16, 1939 – December 15, 2007) was an American biographer, poet, and teacher. She taught feminist studies for many years at Stanford University. She wrote critically acclaimed biographies of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (along with Plath's husband Ted Hughes), and jazz musician Billy Tipton. Early life Middlebrook was born Diane Helen Wood in Pocatello, Idaho, the oldest of three daughters. Her parents were teenagers when she was born. In 1945, when Diane was five, the family moved to Spokane, Washington. She graduated from North Central High School in 1957. Education and teaching career Middlebrook expressed her desire to become a published poet and writer, but received no encouragement from her family. She paid her own way through college. She entered Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, then transferred to the University of Washington in Seattle. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961. She entered Stanford University as an assistant professor of English in 1966, then obtained a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1969. Her doctoral dissertation was a combined study of American poet Wallace Stevens and American poet/philosopher/essayist Walt Whitman; her doctoral advisor was the American writer and literary critic Harold Bloom. Middlebrook began her teaching career at Stanford as an assistant professor in 1966 and gradually worked her way up to university professor and associate dean positions. She won a number of fellowships, grants, and awards along the way. She had not focused on feminist studies before she was tapped for Stanford's new Center for Research on Women (eventually to become the Clayman Institute for Gender Research), one of the first such centers in the nation in the 1970s. She once stated that her chief qualifications were her sex and her availability. She directed the Center from 1977 to 1979. She was chair of Stanford's Feminist Studies Program from 1985 to 1988. She embraced diverse curricula: one syllabus from that era lists both Ovid and Queen Latifah. Middlebrook received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the Stanford Humanities Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Study Center of Bellagio. She was a founding trustee of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, an interdisciplinary arts center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Middlebrook received two honors from Stanford for her teaching effort. In 1977 she was given The Dean's Award; in 1987 she was given the Walter J. Gores Award. She also received the Richard W. Lyman service award. She resigned from Stanford in 2002 to concentrate fully on her writing. By this time, she was a professor emerita. Writing career Middlebrook once stated why she preferred preparing biographic work to other fields of study: "One of the reasons I like working on biographies is that it takes a long time, you don’t have to work quickly. People are going to stay dead." When asked why she had picked Ovid as a subject for a biography, she said: "No estates, no psychotherapy, no