Fiona Paton

Fiona Paton teaches American literature and the Beats at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she has been since 1999. She graduated that same year from Penn State with a PhD in Rhetoric and American Literature. Her dissertation was a stylistic study of Kerouac’s use of popular culture and his development of spontaneous prose. She has published a number of  articles on Kerouac, Burroughs, and Alexander Trocchi. Her latest essay is a study of the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings, due out this year in an anthology on Beat drama and performance. She has presented many conference papers over the years, and had the honor of being part of the Naked Lunch @50 conference in Paris in 2009.