Born near Boston, Megan Benton grew up in an Illinois college town along the Mississippi River. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in the Chicago Review, Gravel, and other publications, and one of her stories was nominated for the Kirkwood Prize at UCLA. She’s been a finalist in the Writers’ Digest Short Short Story contest and runner-up in Good Housekeeping’s annual fiction contest.
Writing as Marlowe Benn, she’s published two books of historical crime fiction. Relative Fortunes and Passing Fancies feature Julia Kydd, a stylish bibliophile who confronts the greed, cynicism, and bigotry of Jazz Age Manhattan. Relative Fortunes was named an Amazon First Reads selection, and it heads the CrimeReads list of 2019’s best traditional mysteries. For more information on these books, visit MarloweBenn.com.
Megan holds a master’s degree from William and Mary in history and editing, another from the University of Alabama in the book arts, and a doctorate from Berkeley in the history of books. Author of Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America and co-editor of Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, she’s given talks in Europe and across North America on cultural typography and the history of modern book design.
She’s also produced books literally. She and her graduate school partner typeset, printed, and bound a forty-page book entirely by hand, using a nineteenth-century iron handpress. She founded an interdisciplinary program in “Publishing and Printing Arts” at Pacific Lutheran University and developed its landmark undergraduate letterpress and book arts studio, the Elliott Press.
Megan loves gypsy jazz, botanical Latin, very dark chocolate, the feminist mysteries of Amanda Cross, Jazz Age fashion, and W. A. Dwiggins’s graphic design. She lives on an island near Seattle with her husband and an unruly but endearing garden overlooking Puget Sound.