A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. 

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Kris McAbee is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and holds a Master's degree in Humanities from New York University.  She is completing her dissertation, "Redoubled: Reproducing the Sixteenth-Century Sonneteer," which investigates the means and motives behind the sonneteer as an enduring cultural icon.  Kris has served as the Early Modern Center Fellow as well as the Research Assistant for the Transcriptions Studio at UCSB.  Kris currently works as the project manager for the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), a digital resource dedicated to mounting online surviving early ballads printed in English, with priority given to black-letter broadsides of the seventeenth century, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Reference Materials Grant (2006-2008).