Kevin R. McNamara is Professor of Literature at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. He is the author of Urban Verbs: Arts and Discourses of American Cities (1996) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles (2010). McNamara has published more than twenty articles primarily on cities and urban culture in such journals as Arizona Quarterly, Canadian Review of American Studies, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, Criticism, Interactions, the Journal of Urban History, and Prospects. His work has also been published in the Encyclopedia of American Studies ('The Idea of the City'), A Concise Companion to American Studies ('Regionalism'), and collections edited in the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey.