Kay Sloan  

Kay Sloan's work has been groundbreaking in the field of woman suffrage and silent film. Working in the pre-digital era, Sloan located films made by woman suffragists to further their cause in an era when many motion pictures brutally satirized the "votes for women" movement. Her documentary, Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema, was the first to bring the surviving films to public attention in the 1970s. Now digitalized and expanded, Sloan's film has been shown in university classrooms and film festivals throughout the world. Her book, "The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film," and her articles, "Sexual Warfare in the Silent Cinema" (American Quarterly) and "A Cinema In Search of Itself" (Cineaste), shaped the then-new field of the early women's movement and cinema.

Sloan earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from The University of Texas. She is also an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist, as well as cultural historian. Her novels, Give Me You, The Patron Saint of Red Chevys, and Worry Beads have won, respectively, the William Faulkner-Wisdom Prize for Novella, Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers selection, nomination for the Mississippi Arts and Letters Book Award, and the Ohioana Award for Best Novel.
She is now Distinguished Professor Emerita at Miami University of Ohio. (7/19)