About Us
Walton Well Press is named after a small road in Oxford, England in a neighborhood called Jericho. The well was built in the nineteenth century as were the workers’ houses on the road. Each, to this day, sports a tympanum depicting the story of the prophet Elijah, who was fed by ravens.
It is a small road—with a well that leads to one of the oldest, non-cultivated and common ground meadows in England set down in the Domesday Book in 1086. It is called Port Meadow. There is a cemetery nearby which buried largely victims of a nineteenth century cholera epidemic.
The road once contained a small college devoted to Catholic Social Teaching as well as a foundry—in this spirit, the press embodies a sacred spring and “that all may have life and live it to the full.”
Theresia de Vroom, Editor and Publisher
Theresia de Vroom is a Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) and was the Director of the Marymount Institute for Faith, Culture, and the Arts, as well as the Editor and Founder of the Marymount Institute Press for 15 years.
de Vroom has written articles on medieval women mystics, medieval beast epics, comparative medieval and Renaissance drama and poetry, and women writing in French and Dutch. She edited and translated the medieval Netherlandic plays of the Hulthelm MS (1993), and she was the producer of the performance piece “Samarkand: Rites and Rituals of the Marketplace” (2008) and its subsequent DVD (2012) with Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka; former LMU President Robert B. Lawton, SJ; actors Danny Glover, CCH Pounder, and Michael Learned; as well as London-based dance master Peter Badejo, OBE. de Vroom was the director and producer of the performance piece “The Book, the Heart, and the Gift: Shakespeare’s First Folio” (2012) at LMU and the editor and compiler of the resulting book, In Possession of Shakespeare: Writing Into Nothing (2012), which included essays by Wole Soyinka, MacArthur Award winner Lewis Hyde, and activist and Catholic worker Jeff Dietrich.
de Vroom is the editor of more than 20 books, including those by distinguished feminist theologians Sandra Schneiders (2013) and Elizabeth Johnson (2014) in conjunction with the Mary Milligan Endowed Lecture Series at LMU. She was the producer and editor of a CD of poems read in honor of Nelson Mandela by Wole Soyinka, called “A Poet’s Guide to Mandelaland” (2014). She was the first LMU professor to receive the Lois P. and Donald H. Graves Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Her book, The Lady Vanishes: Fantasies of Female Heroism in Shakespeare’s Last Plays, was published in 2014. Along with her LMU colleague, Michael Berg, she has also published The Past is a Foreign Country: Accounts of Life in the Japanese Concentration Camps in Occupied Indonesia (1942-1945), a translation of a comic book, two graphic novels, and eyewitness accounts written in the Japanese concentration camps in Indonesia, where her grandfather and several of her relatives were killed during World War II. de Vroom published a children’s book in 2021; The Clever Deer Mouse (2021) features stories she grew up with about the antics of the smallest deer on earth, who defeats crocodiles and farmers with its wit.
As Director of the Marymount Institute, de Vroom curated campus visits from cultural, artistic, and literary luminaries, including Angela Davis, Cornel West, Jamaica Kincaid, Wole Soyinka, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Judy Dater, Beth Henley, Dolores Huerta, Gronk, and Clarice Dlamini-Zuma.
de Vroom lives in Santa Monica with three dogs and four cats and escapes to an Oxford abode off Walton Well Road for the long summer to write and think about books.
