Krista Comer is a Professor of English at Rice University. She works closely with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, and has written widely about women and surfing. She is the author of Surfer Girls in the New World Order (2010) and is at work now on Feminist Surf Life in the Age of Climate Change.
She has lived in Houston, near the Gulf of Mexico coast, for more than 25 years.
Recent writings, including on surfing:
https://rice.academia.edu/kristacomer.
For her Rice faculty profile, see here.
Krista is originally from the Four Corners area of the US Southwest but grew up in California between the Bay Area and Oxnard. She lived a pretty off-the-grid countercultural life before she became a professor. Among other West Coast haunts, she spent time on the Oxnard beaches, more as a swimmer than a surfer, but around surfers. She loves the US West & California, its outdoors, its people, its problems. She wrote Surfer Girls because she sensed in the mid-1990s there was a big topic brewing which she knew something about personally. She is writing Feminist Surf Life now to grapple with what has been learned through the Institute knowledges that can be put toward feminist climate justice action.
In the process of researching and writing these books she has come back to the places she cares about and found new places to love. The women of Surfer Girls and Feminist Surf Life, the groups making up the The Institute for Women Surfers, inspire her to inhabit again a life of the body. Kayaking, swimming . . . Pillar Point, Half Moon Bay, the Gulf Coast bayous, Bristol Bay (Porthcawl, Wales), Port Phillip Bay (Frankston, Victoria, Australia), Ballina on the Gold Coast (Australia). . . . the strategy of returning to waterworlds is working.
Contact Professor Comer at kcomer@rice.edu