The following scholars and poets will present at the
SMU Symposium on Poetic Form
Lucy Alford (she/her) is assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University, specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry and comparative poetics. Alford’s first book, Forms of Poetic Attention (Columbia UP, 2020), examines the forms of attention both required and produced in poetic language, bringing both philosophical and cognitive inquiry into conversation with the inner workings of specific poems. Her second scholarly project, Vital Signs, considers trans-historical elements of poetic form in terms of the human vital signs and vital needs amid contemporary conditions of political and environmental precarity. Alford’s essays have appeared in a range of edited volumes and scholarly journals, including Comparative Literature, Modern Language Notes, and Philosophy & Literature. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and have appeared in such journals as Harpur Palate, Streetlight, Literary Matters, The Warwick Review, Action, Spectacle, Atelier (in Italian translation), and FENCE.
Kendra Allen (she/her) is the author of the essay collection, When You Learn The Alphabet (University of Iowa Press, 2019), which received the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction; the poetry collection The Collection Plate (Ecco, 2021); and the memoir Fruit Punch (Ecco, 2021). She writes Make Love in My Car, a music column for Southwest Review.
Michal “Mikey” Calo (she/her) received her M.A. in Foreign Literatures from Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, where she wrote her thesis on Muriel Rukeyser’s poetics of the body. Currently an English Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, Mikey’s work centers queer, Black, and Jewish Studies, as well as archive theory and poetics. Her research examines how American women, from Modernism to the contemporary moment, formally construct and creatively imagine different temporal horizons to inhabit, against the grain of normative, linear, and progressive conceptions of time. Mikey is also interested in the history (and possible futures) of academic literary criticism, inclusive pedagogies, and the public humanities.
Chen Chen (he/him) is the author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, a best book of 2022 according to the Boston Globe, Electric Lit, NPR, and others. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, was long-listed for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including The New York Times and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast, and Antioch.
Katie Condon (she/her) is the author of Praying Naked, winner of the 2018 The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Prize for poetry. She has been featured on Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below 30 list, and her recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, and Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.
Hannah Crawforth (she/her) is a Reader in Early Modern Literature at King’s College, London, where she has been since receiving her PhD from Princeton in 2009. She is the author of Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2013), and co-author of Shakespeare in London (Arden, Bloomsbury, 2015). She has worked extensively on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, co-editing with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The State of Play (Arden, Bloomsbury, 2017) and commissioning a collection of contemporary poetic responses, On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (2016). They are currently co-editing a special issue of Shakespeare Survey on the poems, the first in the journal’s history, and co-writing a Cambridge Elements volume on teaching Shakespeare’s poems. Crawforth has published extensively on a range of poetry, modern and early modern.
Michel Delville (he/him) teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literature, at the University of Liège, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He has published more than twenty books including The American Prose Poem, J.G. Ballard, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (with Andrew Norris), Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde, Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film & Beyond, and Undoing Art (with Mary Ann Caws), The Political Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust (Routledge, 2017; with Andrew Norris), and Tutto quello che non avreste mai voluto leggere—o rileggere—sul fotoromanzo. Una passeggiata (Comma 22; with Luciano Curreri and Giuseppe Palumbo). He has also (co)edited several volumes of essays on contemporary poetics and is also the author of several poetry collections.
Jeff Dolven (he/him) is the author of three books of criticism, Scenes of Instruction, Senses of Style, and the admittedly hasty Take Care, as well as essays on a variety of subjects, from Renaissance metrics to player pianos. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals in the US and the UK and in two volumes, Speculative Music and A New English Grammar. He is also an editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine and was the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM).
Sarah Ellenzweig (she/her) is Associate Professor of English at Rice University. She is author of The Fringes of Belief: English Literature and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660-1760 (Stanford, 2008) and editor, with John H. Zammito, of The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science (Routledge, 2016). She’s currently writing a book on John Dryden with a particular interest in his criticism, translation, and poetics.
Tarfia Faizullah (she/her) is the author of two poetry collections, Seam (SIU 2014) and Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018). Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies both in the US and abroad, are translated into multiple languages, and have been the recipient of several awards, such as a Fulbright fellowship and three Pushcart prizes. She currently teaches at the University of North Texas as an assistant professor in creative writing.
Benjamin Friedlander (he/him) is Professor of English at the University of Maine’s Orono campus where he teaches American Literature and Poetics and is the editor of Paideuma, a scholarly journal dedicated to modern and contemporary anglophone poetry and poetics. His books include Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism and the poetry volumes One Hundred Etudes and Citizen Cain. As editor, he has collected the critical writings of Charles Olson and Larry Eigner and prepared Robert Creeley’s Selected Poems: 1945-2005.
Mag Gabbert (she/her) is the author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS (Mad Creek Books, 2023), which was selected by Kathy Fagan as the winner of the 2021 Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry; the chapbook The Breakup, which was selected by Kaveh Akbar as the winner of the 2022 Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award; and the chapbook Minml Poems (Cooper Dillon Books, 2020). Her awards include a Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Idyllwild Arts, and Poetry at Round Top. Mag’s work can also be found in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Copper Nickel, Guernica, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Mag has an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech. She lives in Dallas, Texas and teaches at Southern Methodist University.
Natalie Gerber (she/her) is Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at SUNY Fredonia. She uses insights from linguistics to address complex questions of verse prosody in 20th- and 21st-century American verse. She has written about changes in rhyme in English based on L1 languages (through the lyrics of the Somali-Canadian rapper Knaan) and on rhythm, meter, and poetics more generally in the works of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Her latest project looks at the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and Lin-Manuel Miranda, celebrating their virtuosic linguistic feats.
H. L. Hix (he/him) Recent books include a novel, The Death of H. L. Hix; an edition and translation of The Gospel that merges canonical with noncanonical sources in a single narrative, and refers to God and Jesus without assigning them gender; a poetry collection, Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark; an edition, with Julie Kane, of selected poems by contemporary Lithuanian poet Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė, called Terribly In Love; an essay collection, Demonstrategy; and an anthology of “poets and poetries, talking back” Counterclaims. He professes philosophy and creative writing at a university in “one of those square states.”
Erin Kappeler (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. Her work focuses on the racialization of poetic form in the modernist era.
Charles LaPorte (he/him), Professor of English at the University of Washington, is the author of Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (U of Virginia Press, 2011) and The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His research and teaching mostly concern historical poetics and religion.
Meredith Martin (she/her) Meredith Martin specializes in anglophone poetry, historical prosody, historical poetics, digital humanities, critical data studies, poetry and public culture, and disciplinary and pedagogical history. She has taught at Princeton since 2006 and has been Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University since 2013, which she founded. Her book, The Rise and Fall of Meter, Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930 (Princeton UP, 2012), won several prizes. With several collaborators, she has been building and directing, since 2007, the Princeton Prosody Archive, which is the subject of her forthcoming book, Prosody as Archive and inspired her co-writing Data Work in the Humanities. She has received a Mellon New Directions fellowship and is currently working on disciplinarity, poetry, and the origin of languages from Locke to Large Language Models.
Meredith McGill (she/her) is Professor and Chair of English at Rutgers University, where she teaches 19thC American literature, book history, and poetry and poetics.
Lisa Moore (she/her) is the Lambda-Award winning author or editor of several books of feminist and queer criticism and literary history, as well as the poetry chapbook 24 Hours of Men. Her nonfiction essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and her critical essays on the sonnet have appeared in Critical Inquiry and The Hopkins Review. She is currently completing a hybrid-genre book project called How Lesbians Saved Poetry. Lisa is Archibald A. Hill Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Daniel Moss (he/him) is an associate professor in the English Department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He received his B.A. from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, where he was a Mellon Fellow. Specializing in late 16th-century poetry and drama, Dan’s book, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan Poetry (Toronto, 2014), maps the wide-ranging effects of Ovid’s pre-eminence as a source for imitation by the poets and playwrights of the 1590s. His work has also appeared in Modern Philology, Critical Survey, Spenser Studies, The Spenser Review, and in edited collections. Dan’s book in progress is The Play within the Plays: Shakespeare, the Chamberlain’s Men, and the Continuity of Metatheater.
Timo Müller (he/him) Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His research focuses on modernism, Black poetry, and the environmental humanities. His work has appeared in journals including American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He has edited several textbooks and written two monographs, The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction (2010) and The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (2018), which is now available in paperback from the University of Mississippi Press. From 2023 to 2027 he is directing the ERC-funded research project “Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility.”
Andrew Osborn (he/him) teaches literature and poetry-writing at the University of Dallas, where he also directs the Institute of Philosophic Studies doctoral program’s literature concentration. His symposium-related scholarly work includes articles on Paul Muldoon’s “Fuzzy Rhyme” (Contemporary Literature), poetic “Difficulty” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics), “Stevens’s Soil: Intelligence, Conceptual Affordances, and the Genius Beyond” (Wallace Stevens Journal), “Wittgenstein, Stevens, and the Uses of Unclarity” (ditto), and the “Push of Reading” in Whitman, Ashbery, and Jorie Graham (Philological Review). An essay on “The Fictive Son, the Geneticist, and Scripted Agency in Albee’s Virginia Woolf” is forthcoming in Modern Drama. He recently became editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal.
Colleen Rosenfeld (she/her) specializes in the study of early modern poetry and poetics. Her first book, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (Fordham University Press, 2018), is a defense of eloquence — not as a sign of the aesthetic but as the source of a particular kind of knowledge closely aligned with the emergent field of vernacular poesie. Rosenfeld’s essays have appeared in ELH, English Literary Renaissance and Modern Philology, and the edited collection Othello: State of Play. She is currently at work on a second book titled, Seeing Things Otherwise: Variations on Form in Shakespeare and Picasso.
Alexis Sears (she/her) is the author of Out of Order (Autumn House Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poetry by the Sea Book Award: Best Book of 2022. Her work appears in The Best American Poetry, The Cortland Review, the Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Rattle, and elsewhere. Sears grew up in Palos Verdes, California. She earned a BA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 2017 and an MFA in poetry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2019. She is an editor-at-large of the Northwest Review and a contributing editor of Literary Matters. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Samyak Shertok (he/him) is currently a Visiting Writer-in-Residence and Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing at Southern Methodist University. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry, Best New Poets, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, KROnline, New England Review, Shenandoah, Waxwing, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry, the AWP Intro Journals Award, and the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry. He holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah where he received the Steffensen Cannon Fellowship, the Tanner Humanities Fellowship, and the Graduate Research Fellowship and was the Poetry Editor for Quarterly West.
Courtney Weiss Smith (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Wesleyan University and an Associate Editor at History & Theory. She is also the editor, with James Noggle, of a substantively revised 11th edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. C, The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (forthcoming, 2023). Her first book, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (University of Virginia Press, 2016), won the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. She is a currently writing Sound Stuff: Words in Enlightenment Philosophy and Poetics, a history of ideas about poetic sound (including rhyme, onomatopoeia, pun, and polyptoton).
Leah Souffrant (she/her) is a writer and artist committed to interdisciplinary practice. She is the author of Entanglements (Unbound Edition Press 2023) and Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable (Collection Clinamen, PULG Liège 2017). Souffrant holds a PhD in English (The Graduate Center, CUNY), an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry (Bennington) and a BA in Russian Literature (Vassar). She has been awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and her scholarship was recognized by the Center for the Study of Women & Society. In 2020, her poetry collection was a finalist for the National Poetry Award. In 2019, Souffrant served as Artistic Consultant at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and in 2023 she became a co-founder of the LeAB Iteration Lab for theater art and performance. She is Clinical Associate Professor of writing at New York University.
Ronnie K. Stephens (he/him) holds a Bachelor of Arts in Classical Studies, a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction. Stephens is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Texas at Arlington, specializing in American poetry and transgressive teaching practices for the 21st century classroom. His research centers the role of poetry in subverting antiethnic and anti-LGBTQ legislation affecting public education today. In addition to his role as an Assistant Professor of English, Ronnie is a staff reviewer for The Poetry Question. He is the author of three books, including the illustrated poetry collection They Rewrote Themselves Legendary, which won the New England Book Prize.
Roi Tartakovsky (he/him) Senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. His research is on poetry and poetics with an emphasis on sound, rhythm and figurative language. His book on rhyme in its interrelations with psychoanalysis and cognitive poetics came out in 2021, and he is currently serving as associate editor of Poetics Today.
Frederick Turner (he/him), Founders Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, was educated at Oxford University. Poet, interdisciplinary scholar, art and literary critic, translator, philosopher, former editor of The Kenyon Review, he has authored over 40 books and 300 articles. He is a winner of the Levinson Prize for poetry and has been nominated internationally over eighty times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His most recent books are Goethe’s Faust, Part One in poetic translation with Zsuzsanna Ozsváth (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2020) and Latter Days (original poetry), Colosseum Books, 2022.
Amelia Worsley (she/her) is Assistant Professor in English at Amherst College. Her research is focused on British poetry of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. She is author of Singing By Herself: Lonely Poets in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cornell 2024) and with Joselyn M. Almeida has co-edited a special issue on Romanticism, Abolition and Anti-Slavery Literatures: Pedagogies and Contexts for Romantic Circles Praxis. She has also published on Shakespeare’s Ophelia (ELH), Southey’s abolition verse (Romantic Circles), Charlotte Smith’s echoic poetics (Placing Charlotte Smith), and Wordsworth and Lucretius (The Wordsworth Circle).