Facebook pixel Kate Bolton Bonnici | Pepperdine University | Seaver College Skip to main content
Pepperdine | Seaver College
Kate Bolton Bonnici

Kate Bolton Bonnici

Associate Professor of English
SAAJ Program Director
Humanities and Teacher Education, Seaver College
PLC 113
310.506.4225
kateboltonbonnici.com

Biography

Kate Bolton Bonnici received her PhD in English from UCLA and her MFA in poetry from UC Riverside. Prior to that, she earned a JD from NYU and practiced law in California and in Alabama. Dr. Bonnici’s debut poetry collection, Night Burial, won the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her second book, A True & Just Record (Boiler House Press/Beyond Criticism Editions, 2023), is situated at the crossroads of early modern criticism and poetry. Through various critical-creative modes, she explores 16th- and 17th-century English printed pamphlets on witchcraft, witch beliefs, and the early modern witch trials, together with archival materials on medicine, religion, and aging.

Dr. Bonnici’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Philosophy & Rhetoric, Cultural Critique, The Georgia Review, The Maine Review, Image, CounterText, Tupelo Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Arts & Letters, Foundry, Exemplaria, and elsewhere. Dr. Bonnici’s next book, Blood or Other: Compositions, will be published in 2027 by Cornerstone Press (University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point).

Education

  • PhD, UCLA
  • MFA, UC Riverside
  • JD, NYU Law
  • BA, Harvard University

 

  • "Death, Love, and the Long Repeat: Repetition’s Burden in Lady Jane Lumley’s The Tragedie of Euripides called Iphigeneia translated out of Greake into Englisshe." Philosophy & Rhetoric 57 (4): 435–461 (2024).
  • "A WORLD of Wonders: Rhetorics, Poetics, Prepositions," Editor's Selection, Tupelo Quarterly 33 (2024). 
  • "On Emily Dickinson's Gorgeous Nothings: Responses in Miniature," Best of Tupelo Quarterly, edited by Kristina Marie Darling, Tupelo Press (2023).
  • "Story of Grandmother," The Maine Review (2023).
  • A True & Just Record (Boiler House Press/Beyond Criticism Editions 2023).
  • “Via Lactea,” Georgia Review (Winter 2022).
  • “Swimming through the Fires: The Lucretian Beast Fable in The Duchess of Malfi,” Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory (Spring 2022).
  • “Ritual,” Tupelo Quarterly 26 (March 2022).
  • “During This Pandemic I Read Thomas Dekker’s ‘The Wonderfull Yeare. 1603,’” “Witch Stichomythia: Joan Cason, Executed in 1586,” “Still Utopia,” and “Echo: A sound rebounding to a noise or voice in a valley or wood; a resounding or giving again of the voice.” Foundry (UCHRI, September 2021).
  • “Witch Stichomythic: from The Confession of Elizabeth Fraunces, late of Hatfeelde in Essex,” CounterText 6.3 (January 2021).
  • Night Burial (Center for Literary Publishing 2020).

  • Brett J. Love Award for Teaching Excellence, Pepperdine University (2023).

  • Winner, Colorado Prize for Poetry (2020).

  • Mellon Fellow in Post-Classical Latin (2015-2016).

Topics

  • Creative Criticism
  • Poetry and Poetics
  • Rhetoric and Law
  • Criminal Justice
  • Renaissance Studies

Courses

  • Constitutional Law
  • Rhetorical Theory
  • Professional Writing
  • First-Year Composition
  • Creative Writing