poet & essayist
writing professor (1979 - 2023, Oklahoma State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca College)
I grew up in a small town on the plains of western Oklahoma near the banks of the Canadian River, near where my father's parents and grandparents homesteaded early in the last century. Winters are cold and dry there, but relatively short; springs are exciting with their new growth and the frequent tornadic eruptions; summers hot and dry of course, but the evening sunsets are spectacular, as if painted by an overzealous child artist; and autumns, once past the heat of summer, are long and mild--every season lots of sun, breath-taking winds, and of course enormous skies.
I took a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Oklahoma State University in '79 and then worked odd jobs for a while--dishwasher, waiter, liquor store manager, social services secretary in Boulder, Colorado--before returning to school to study more literature, philosophy, and creative writing. But that took a while too, before providing a settled life, a year in this graduate school, another in that. Then I moved to Ithaca, New York, to study in Cornell University's M.F.A. program and fell in love with the area, happy to be learning from Archie Ammons and Robert Morgan. After graduating in '84, I taught creative writing Cornell's English Department for two years and then roamed around the Northeast teaching writing at Hudson Valley community colleges and then two years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1990 I moved back to Ithaca to take a position in Ithaca College's Writing Program and settle down with my family. I'm proud to have been a part of that faculty in the 90s that molded from the Program a bona fide Department, offering an interesting B.A. with four different concentrations.
I'm retired from teaching now--after 32 years at Ithaca College--but when I was teaching I discovered that my ultimate goal in the classroom was to instill in my students an intellectual generosity, primarily by modeling it I would like to think--that is, to be less interested in espousing knowledge than in encouraging a particular attitude toward it, expansive and open-armed. I taught a variety of courses at Ithaca College over the years: a freshman seminar on the philosophy and science of sex and love; personal essay writing; poetry writing; a 300-level Poetics course that covered the history of ideas from Thales to Critical Race Theory; a senior seminar teaching traditional poetry forms; and three Honors seminars, one on the philosophy and science of sex and love, another on the pursuit of happiness, and another on Western concepts of the self since the Renaissance.
Primary areas of Interest: Poetry Writing, Essay Writing, Literary Theory (Poetics), Intellectual History
PUBLICATIONS
Poetry
books
forthcoming:
My Mother's Hands, 2026: from Finishing Line Press (finalist in their annual chapbook competition)
Boomerang: New & Selected Translations of Poems by Cory Brown (a bi-lingual edition, translator Ruey-shan Chen), 2026, from Bookman Bookstore Publishers, Taipei
from Cayuga Lake Books:
--A Long Slow Climb, 2023: three sections entitled Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, twenty-one sonnets in each section whose inspiration is Dante's Divine Comedy [an interview with me about the book: https://cayugalakebooks.com/cory-brown-2/]
--elisions, 2019: four sections entitled Desire, Knowledge, Compassion, and Time, eleven poems each, all multiple haiku stanzas [a review: http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/elisions-by-cory-brown]
--What May Be Lost, 2014, prose poems
from other Publishers:
Poems, 1986-1998, 2003, Water Street Press [a collection of three full-length books]
A Warm Trend, 1989, winner of Swallow's Tale Press's national manuscript competition
journals
forthcoming:
The Comstock Review, “Quandary" (Special Recognition, Muriel Craft Bailey poetry competition)
in print:
Cloudbank 19, “Understanding Russian," 2025
Oberon Poetry Magazine, “Out in the Deep” (Honorable Mention, Oberon poetry competition), 2025
LitMag, vol. 6, “Giant Sequoias" (Runner-up, Anton Chekhov flash fiction competition), 2024
Mudfish 24, “Boomerang” (nominated for a Pushcart) and “Reality," 2024
Mudfish 23 ("What We Know," 2023)
Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry ("What I'd Thought" and "To Live," 2023)
The Comstock Review ("Something Strange," 2023)
Cloudbank 16 ("But Here's the Thing," 2022)
Cloudbank 15 ("On the Terrace of the Wrathful" and "On the Terrace of the Envious," 2021)
From the Fingerlakes: A Memoir Anthology ("When I am Asked" and "The Verbalist," 2021)
Bellevue Literary Review 40 ("To See How the Snow Blanketed the Trees," 2021)
december magazine ("Friday the 13th," 2021)
Alluvian, ("Learning," 2019)
Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process. Codhill Press ("The Most Difficult Thought" and "Experience-Dependent Neuroplasticity," 2018)
Crosswinds Poetry Journal ("The Tyranny of Narrative," 2018)
Arroyo Literary Review ("Bats" and "Cool Hand Luke," 2011)
Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics ("Ghosts," 2010)
The Fiddlehead ("Traffic," 2011; "Memory," 2008)
Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry ("Not Yet," 2011; "Dream," 2008)
The Antigonish Review ("Fairgrounds" and "The Nazi Helmet," 2011; "The Heifer" and "Storm Cellar," 2007)
Postmodern Culture (vol. 8 #1: "First Communion," "There Was a Time," "Summer Question," and "Stars of Desire," 1997)
Postmodern Culture (vol. 6 #2: "Early Spring" and "Equinox"; vol. 6 #3: "My Name in Water," "Adumbration," "Offering," and "Depth Perception," 1996)
Bomb ("Kneeling at the Edge," a suite of poems, issue 51, 1995)
Farmer's Market ("Rhetoric of Senses," vol.10 no.2, 1994)
Bomb ("Fireflies," "All Yours," and "Nature of the Sun," issue 40, 1992)
Essays
I started publishing essays in 2006, with a piece arguing that the role of poetry and the arts in our technocratic culture is not as subversive as we might think--and I ponder on what might make it more so. ["Notes on the Role of the Arts in a Technocratic Culture"]
The following year I published a playful piece on the epistemology of thinking--what we can claim to know and how to think about what we know, and the role language plays in that quandary--in a Boston literary magazine called Diner. ["On Thinking: Thoughts on Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Language"]
In 2010, Xanthe Matychak (my wife) and I put our heads together to write an essay on sustainable design. ["Sustainability Maximizes Innovation: the use of life cycle assessment tools to enhance the design process"] It was presented at two conferences: 2010, the American Anthropological Association's annual conference, in New Orleans; and in 2012, the 16th annual National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, in San Francisco.
In 2013, I published a piece in South Loop Review on my sister's death--it was a top-three finalist in Missouri Review's annual essay contest. ["Compliance: Death and Dying in America"] In 2016, Journal of Narrative Politics published a companion essay to that essay. ["Thoughts on the Metaphysics of American White Racism"]
That same year, 2016, I published two more essays, one an epilogue I was invited to contribute for a Routledge collection of essays by writers from around the world: Narrative Global Politics: Theory, History and the Personal in International Relations ["Dancing Modernity"]. The other essay I published that year is an autobiographical piece called "Brutality of Desire," also in Journal of Narrative Politics.
In 2018, after teaching an Ithaca College Honors course on the evolution of the self in Western thought since the Renaissance, I published an essay on that topic in Writing on the Edge. ["The Sick Rose: Some Problems with the Self"]
The following year, 2019, again after creating and teaching an Honors course on the topic, I wrote a book-length analysis on the pursuit of happiness, a compendium of both classical and modern thought on the topic, with autobiographical thoughts. It was then published in the proceedings of the Hawaii University International Conference on the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences & Education, where I presented a talk on it. ["The Ultimate Goal: Reflections on the Philosophy and Science of the Pursuit of Happiness"]
In 2022, the editors at Journal of Narrative Politics published an essay of mine on my experiences following an automobile accident I was involved in when I as twenty--the piece includes some cultural analysis and, more generally, some philosophical speculation on the passing of time. ["A Body in Time: Thoughts on the Effects of Change"]