[1] She is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College where she teaches courses in poetics, poethics, and experimental traditions in the arts.
[2] Born in Manhattan October 13, 1941, she grew up in Chelsea, the Bronx, and Charleston S.C., spending time in the mid-West before moving in the sixties to Washington D.C. where she was active in arts, antiwar, and civil rights groups based at the Institute for Policy Studies.
She took part in many socio- political actions during that time, including the education project for Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign.
The editors of the anthology Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America note that Retallack is "well known for her important intervention in and contribution to feminist criticism, 'Re: Thinking: Literary: Feminism,' [in her book The Poethical Wager] in which she rejects several feminist literary models, proffering instead a multiple, unintelligible, polylingual 'experimental feminine' that can 'exercise the power of the feminine' as construct, 'aesthetic behavior' and not as the 'expression of female experience (author’s italics).
She calls for a literary feminism that reflects the 'disruptively audible—if not immediately intelligible—swerve or real gender/genre trouble [that] is possible only if we recognize what has been the continual constituting of feminine forms in language.'