Stout, Janis P.

Professor of English and scholar on the works of Katherine Anne Porter.

Janis Pitts Stout was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1939. She graduated from Polytechnic High School in Fort Worth, married soon afterward, and became the mother of three sons before completing a B.A. (1966) and an M.A. (1968) in English at Lamar State University in Beaumont, Texas. After the birth of her fourth son, she entered the graduate program in English at Rice University, completing her doctoral degree there in 1973. She taught at Bryn Mawr College; Haverford College; Pennsylvania State University, Delaware County; Lamar State University; Rice University; and Texas A & M University before her retirement on January 31, 2002. Much of her career, however, was given to administration. She served at Rice University as Administrator of Graduate Programs, then Director of Graduate Programs, for ten years; as Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at Texas A & M from 1987 to 1992 and 1993 to 1994; as Interim Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at Auburn University from 1992 to 1993; and as Dean of Faculties and Associate Provost at Texas A & M from 1998 to 2002. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Dr. Stout's publications include three novels: A Family Likeness (1982), Eighteen Holes (1984), Home Truth (1992) and six scholarly books: Sodoms in Eden (1976), The Journal Narrative in American Literature (1984), Strategies of Reticence (1990), Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times (1995), Through the Window, Out the Door: Women's Narratives of Departure (1998), and Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (2000). She compiled and edited A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather (2002). She and her husband, Dr. Loren D. Lutes, now reside in Edgewood, New Mexico.