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 is author of Surfer Girls in the New World Order. She has lived on the Gulf Coast in Houston for more than 20 years.
Recent writings, including on surfing:
https://rice.academia.edu/kristacomer.
Here is Krista’s work-related website.
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.
In the process of researching and writing the book she has come back to the places she cares about and found new places to love. The women of Surfer Girls and 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). . . . the strategy of returning to waterworlds is working.
Contact Professor Comer at kcomer@rice.edu