Toni McNaron

Toni McNaron, also known as Toni A. H. McNaron, (born April 3, 1937) is an American literary scholar, educator, and author. She is a professor emerita of English at the University of Minnesota, where she also served as the first coordinator of the university's Women's Studies Department. During her time at the University of Minnesota, McNaron received numerous awards for her teaching, leadership, and community service. McNaron also authored numerous articles, two memoirs, and several books on Shakespeare, LGBT-related issues and experiences, incest, and feminist literary criticism.

Early life and Education McNaron was born on April 3, 1937, in Alabama. In an interview with Lisa Westberg of the Minnesota Daily, McNaron stated that she grew up in the South; neither of her parents attended college but they "liked to read," and it was assumed that she would continue her education. Chapters such as "Into the Cauldron" describe how this and other experiences throughout her youth and early adulthood were formative and contributed to her lifelong commitment to understanding race and racism. During this period, she also became a feminist and an anti-Vietnam War activist.

When McNaron came out as a lesbian in 1973, she did so publicly to her students in class. During the same period, Minnesota educator and State Senator Allan Spear, who is credited with being the nation's first openly gay legislator, came out in 1974 and was also among the first openly gay or lesbian faculty at the University of Minnesota.

Career Before joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1964 as assistant professor in English, McNaron was an instructor at All Saints' College (Vicksburg, MS) 1959-1961 and a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin (1961–1963). McNaron was selected from 100 applicants by the Regents to serve as its first coordinator, a position she held from 1973 to 1976. The University of Minnesota Women's Studies Department was notable because it was the first in the country to offer a Women's Studies major. By its 25th anniversary in 1998, it offered a Ph.D. program, one of only six in the country.

As the coordinator of the Women's Studies program, throughout the 1970s McNaron consulted with other colleges and universities interested in establishing women's studies programs, including the University of Iowa, the University of South Dakota, Macalester College, Carleton College, and Minneapolis Community and Technical College. During this period, McNaron was also involved with national organizations such as the National Women's Studies Association, which had its first national conference in 1979. She served as a member of the organization's first steering committee from 1977 to 1978. In connection with her efforts to advocate for the LGBT community, McNaron received a Breaking the Silence Award from the University of Minnesota Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Employee Network commemorating National Coming Out Week and the 4th anniversary of the GLBT Programs Office.

The Schochet Center for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies The Schochet Center for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies opened in July 2000. The goals of the Schochet Center were to create a vibrant and productive center for teaching, learning, research, and community outreach; to foster academic and public discussion of GLBT issues; and to bridge gaps between the university and the community. The center was the first such center in the Midwest and the third in the nation. According to the Gender and Sexuality Center for Queer and Trans Life at the University of Minnesota, while a student at the university in the late 1950s, Schochet experienced harassment and threats of expulsion for his sexual orientation. Zemsky and McNaron led the effort to get university recognition and funding for a Center for GLBT Studies, which included visiting deans from colleges throughout the university. During her tenure, CIS served 15,000-20,000 high school students and enhanced the professional development of 200 high school teachers. Notable guest speakers who have participated in the CIS program include author Kao Kalia Yang, poet and writer Heid Erdrich, and Sarah Bellamy, artistic director for the Penumbra Theater Company.

Voices from the Gaps (North American Writers of Color) (VG) In 1996, along with Carol Miller, a professor of American Studies and American Indian Studies, and graduate student Laurie Dickinson, McNaron developed Voices from the Gaps (VG), a website with a mission to "uncover, highlight, and share works of marginalized artists, predominantly women writers of color living and working in North America."

Originally hosted by the English Department and now hosted by and searchable through the university's Digital Conservancy, the site was an innovative, technology-enhanced learning initiative at the time. Maureen Smith, writing in 1999, described its pedagogical mission:

The pioneering site’s focus was largely educational, aimed at a diverse audience of students in secondary schools and institutions of higher education. Created just as Internet use exploded, VG reached a global readership and cultivated a collaborative and intercommunal group of scholars, students, educators, and women artists. Students, volunteers, and VG readers submitted the majority of the site’s entries, including author biographies, book reviews, academic essays, and interviews with women artists. Additionally, the site’s creators developed a robust selection of pedagogical materials to help instructors incorporate VG resources in secondary school and undergraduate classrooms.

The site was revised twice to include multimedia files and to expand the scope of the collection to “feature women artists regardless of genre of work, race, minority status, or geographical location."

Center for Educational Innovation (CEI) McNaron also served as a founding director of the university's Center for Teaching and Learning Services, which led to the creation of the Early Career Teaching Program: Pursuing Excellence in Multicultural Education program for faculty at the university.

In 2017, McNaron was recognized by the CEI at the University of Minnesota for her commitment to teaching excellence in its publication, Innovative Teaching and Learning: Experiments Across the Disciplines, in a dedication entitled “To Toni A. H. McNaron.” The publication, edited by Irene D. Alexander and Robert K Poch, noted that, as “a founding director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Teaching and Learning Services, and creator of the ‘Early Career Teaching Program: Pursuing Excellence in Multicultural Education,’ [McNaron] exemplified her belief that institutional excellence derives from ‘curriculum, instruction, and scholarship that are culturally informed and inclusive of the students and larger society the University serves." In a 2025 blog post entitled, “Where to Teach,” McNaron described how her experiences with first-generation college students early in her teaching career inspired her to later develop reading groups for adults:

When I began to teach at the University of Minnesota (1964), many students told me they were the first in their family to go to college. As students in a Shakespeare course, they felt "stupid" because they had never seen one of his plays or read one of his plays. I was gifted with these words as my answer: "You are not stupid; you are ignorant because you have not been exposed to Shakespeare. You are taking this course to get exposed to him and it is my job to help you do that." As time went on, I decided it might be my job to help adults get exposed to wonderful writers, so I became interested in ways to do that initially through the University, but eventually through a variety of avenues. In 1976–77, Morris, Robins, and McNaron created Several Stray Matters, a play adapted from the works of Virginia Woolf, which led to a second production Orlando, Orlando based on a Woolf novel. McNaron was the literary consultant for Orlando, Orlando and presented workshops as part of eight performances in high schools, colleges and universities throughout Greater Minnesota in 1978. In 2010, McNaron was the Willa Cather scholar on an adaptation of My Antonia, which toured throughout Minnesota and Nebraska, and was reprised several times, including in 2014 in Minneapolis and in 2019 at the Lied Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Nebraska. In 2024, Illusion Theater's 50th anniversary series included an evening showcasing McNaron's commentary on short performances from Shakespeare's four romances, the subject of McNaron's book, Live and Deal With Others Better: The Gift of Shakespeare’s Romances.

Maiden Rock Women's Learning Institute In 1975 McNaron and four other women came together as a collective to create a feminist alternative learning community. They found property near Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, that included an abandoned cattle barn. They remodeled it to accommodate groups for week-long sessions, and began offering courses in 1976 both at the Maiden Rock Women's Learning Institute and in the Twin Cities. Courses covered a wide range of topics and were taught by University of Minnesota faculty, therapists, artists, building contractors, wilderness guides, musicians, playwrights, and women from other fields. McNaron, also a member of the program planning group, taught several classes including Remaking Our Myths, Heritage, Lesbian Culture, Women and the Professions: How To Be “In” Them and Not “Of” Them, and Women's Poetry: Then, Now and Later. In addition to classes, the Maiden Rock Collective also hosted gatherings including one on May 1, 1977, advertised as the 1st annual lesbian gathering which “is the first time to our knowledge that lesbians have celebrated together their coming-out process.” The collective discontinued the Women's Learning Institute after two years of classes because it was unable to raise enough money to continue. The journal included feature articles, poetry, essays, community news, photography and graphic arts. So’s Your Old Lady was started at the Lesbian Resource Center, which was founded in 1972, and which published the first 15 issues. McNaron joined the staff in 1975 and worked on issue #7 and all subsequent issues until the journal moved with one of its contributors to the University of Maryland. She also contributed feature articles and poems, including a poem entitled “Lesbian Themes in Modern American Literature” about the trepidation she felt before walking into a classroom to teach the first class of this first-ever course.

Awards McNaron has received numerous awards for her teaching, leadership, and community service, including the following:

1968: UMN Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education, which recognizes faculty for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education and contributes to the improvement of undergraduate education at the university by publicizing honorees’ work to serve as a resource for the whole faculty Scholar Maureen Reddy wrote that Poisoned Ivy brought together McNaron's "personal narrative, the results of a study she conducted of three hundred-plus gay and lesbian academics, and insights gleaned from other research to construct this multidimensional portrait of the academy during the past three decades." Although Poisoned Ivy was originally meant to be an autobiography focusing on McNaron's experiences as a closeted academic, it eventually expanded into a detailed chronicle of attitudinal and policy changes in academia from the 1960s to 1990s, including McNaron's home department at the University of Minnesota:

ne catalyst for this project was the very positive reception accorded to two gay men--partners--hired by her department in 1992. Between her own hiring in 1964 and the arrival of these colleagues nearly thirty years later, "the picture at the University of Minnesota was dismal and frightening." The difference between her experiences as a closeted, young professor and the experience of her new, entirely out colleagues evidently prompted McNaron to think about what changes had occurred in the academy and what still [remained] to be done, and she shifted her focus to a blend of ethnographic and autobiographical study.

Calling the book a "treasure of information of the challenges faced by lesbian and gay faculty," reviewer Shane Phelan wrote that "Poisoned Ivy details the past and present cost of homophobia to lesbian and gay faculty, to research agendas focused on queer populations and ideas, and to institutions that lose the energy and commitment of faculty."

Other Notable Works