Q&A with Wendy Roberts, a literary historian who made history

When Wendy Roberts published her new book in July, she accomplished a distinctive feat: Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press) is the first history of non-hymnal evangelical poetry in British North America.

What's non-hymnal evangelical poetry? It's written verse, Wendy explains below, that "didn’t conform to standards of taste; in fact, it explicitly rejected them. It wanted a mass audience; it refused elite language and claimed that the common person’s poetry was the language of heaven."

What's its relevance to today? "Literature and religious experience are deeply entwined, and that entanglement is important to American history."

How can evangelicals support Trump given his character traits and why have evangelicals become such a divisive, scorned group? Hmm. Find out how Wendy Roberts, English professor at the University at Albany, replies to that question and a few more at The Conversation.