Keynote Speakers

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include We Are Mermaids; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.

Jonathan Culler is the Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. His Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, won MLA’s Lowell Prize and established his reputation as analyst and expositor of critical theory. Now known especially for On Deconstruction: Literature and Theory After Structuralism, and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (which has been translated into some 27 languages), he published Theory of the Lyric (Harvard University Press) in the spring of 2015. Professor Culler has been President of the American Comparative Literature Association, Secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies and Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. At Cornell he served as chair of the departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Romance Studies, as well as Senior Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, to the American Philosophical Society in 2006, and to the British Academy in 2020.

Virginia Jackson is a lyric theorist and historian. Her books include Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023), The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (with Yopie Prins; Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), and Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005). She is currently writing two books: What is Poetry? and The Poetry of the Future. Her articles, essays, and reviews appear in Critical Inquiry, The Los Angeles Review of Books, PMLA, New Literary History, MLQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Studies in Romanticism, Victorian Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of the Historical Poetics Working Group and a trustee of The English Institute. She has received two National Endowment for the Humanities awards for her work on the history of American poetry. In 2021, she was the Bain-Swiggett Visiting Poetry Scholar at Princeton. In 2006, Dickinson’s Misery won both the MLA First Book Prize and the Gauss award from Phi Beta Kappa. She has taught at Boston University, Rutgers University, NYU, Tufts, and is currently UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine.

Maureen N. McLane was raised in upstate New York and holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Oxford and the University of Chicago. She is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published eight books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award, and Some Say, Finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and for The Believer Award in Poetry; her most recent book is What You Want: poems (FSG, Penguin UK, 2023). She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, My Poets, a New York Times Notable Book. Other works include two monographs on British romantic poetics and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Czech and have recently appeared in London Review of Books, Poesia, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review.Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, the LRB, The New York Times Book Review, Public Books, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her book, My Poetics, is forthcoming from Chicago in spring 2024. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.

Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of six books on poetry and poetics, including Poetry in a Global Age (2020), A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), all from the University of Chicago Press. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017), coeditor of the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012, 2018), and associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and the American Philosophical Society in 2022, he is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA, and an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University, Denmark.

Anthony Reed is Professor of English and The Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. He has published widely  on poetry, poetics, and experimental aesthetics in the African diaspora. Among his works are the monographs Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), which won the 2014 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association for an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture, and Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2021). He recently edited Langston Hughes in Context with Vera Kutzinski (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is currently working on two research projects: one on Black lyric theory and a related project that looks to literature, film, and popular music to develop an account of diaspora from below amid the waning influence of Pan-Africanism and Communism in and beyond the former Third World.

Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry and six collections of poetry, including suddenly we, semiautomatic, and the new black. Her poetry was twice awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her criticism also appears in The Black Scholar, New Literary History, Callaloo, The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, The New Emily Dickinson Studies, and other publications. Additional honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the Stephen Henderson Award, and support from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, ACLS, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Shockley currently serves as an Editor at Contemporary Literature and is at work on a critical project tentatively titled Black Graphics: Colorblindness and the Survival of Black Being.