Dr. Tara Penry teaches American literature at Boise State University, with an emphasis on literature of the American West and the nineteenth century. Dr. Penry joined the faculty of the Department of English Literature in 2000, after earning a Ph.D. from Fordham University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century U.S. periodicals, regionalism from the colonial era to the present, and the short story writer Bret Harte. Dr. Penry is a past president of the Western Literature Association. At Boise State she has edited the BSU Western Writers Series and Western Writers Online, and has directed the Hemingway Western Studies Center.