Office: 218 Belfast Hall, 85 Texas Avenue, Bangor, ME 04401
Phone: (207) 262-7760
Email: kay.retzlaff@maine.edu
About
Education
B.A., University of Nebraska at Lincoln (1976)
M.A., University of Nebraska at Lincoln (1981)
Ph.D., University of Maine (2004)
Introduction to All Things Retzlavian
Kay Retzlaff grew up on a Nebraska farm. Her father’s grandparents emigrated from Frankfurt on Oder, Germany, to Nebraska in the 1880s. Her mother’s great grandparents came from Ireland a bit earlier than that.
(Pictured left: The German Great-Grandparents ca. 1880.)
As a child, Retzlaff attended a one-room country schoolhouse for kindergarten through second grade then moved to a two-room Lutheran-run school. She earned her B.A. in English, with a minor in history, as well as her M.A. in English, with an emphasis on writing and rhetoric, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Maine in Orono where she wrote her dissertation on the medieval Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailgne. (This is often translated as “The Cattle Raid of Cooley.)
Dr. Retzlaff worked as a writer for 12 years in Washington, D.C., writing and editing various trade publications. She served as assistant press secretary for a U.S. senator from Kentucky. That’s how she met her husband. He was working as press secretary for the other senator from Kentucky. He’s a Kentucky boy, who was born in West Virginia. He Claims he’s a child of Appalachia. They have been living in Maine since Labor Day 1993.
She is the author of two books, Ireland: Its Myths and Legends and Women of Mythology. She has edited a number of other works, her most recent being Winterport author and great cook Bich Nga Burrill’s Vietnam Memories: A Cookbook. She is writing a book on the Irish immigrants of Belfast, Maine. Her short stories and poems have appeared in numerous small magazines.
