Laura Capp holds a PhD in English from the University of Iowa with an emphasis in Victorian and modernist British literature and an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book. In both her scholarship and her artwork, she explores relationships between speakers and audiences and the complications attendant to communication. Capp’s literary research examines how women poets of the dramatic monologue stage relationships between marginalized speakers like a runaway slave, a prostitute, and a nun and the silent auditors who listen to their desperate utterances. Capp's calligraphic artwork renders such communicative obstacles visually, creating barriers to legibility and meaning that simultaneously invite and frustrate attempts at reading. Capp owns Postscript, a paper boutique in Ashland (NE).