EMPLOYMENT
2003-current Mills College at Northeastern University.
Professor in 2011.
Unit Head, Mills College at Northeastern University, 2023-ongoing.
Dean of Graduate Studies, Mills College, 2017-2023.
Director of Creative Writing, Mills College, 2007-2014
1997-2003 University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Department of English.
Associate Professor in 2003.
1997-1996 Siena College, Department of English.
Visiting Assistant Professor.
EDUCATION
1996 PhD, Department of English, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY.
1988 BA, Department of Languages & Literature, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
AWARDS
Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow
Stanford Humanities Center, 2020.
O. B. Hardison Prize
Folger Shakespeare Library, 2009.
Beatric Bain Research Fellow for Research on Women
University of California at Berkeley, 2006.
Research Fellowship
American Council of Learned Societies, 2005.
BOOKS
Crowd Control: Riot and Literary Reward. (scholarship)
With Claire Grossman and Stephanie Young. Under consideration.
Poetry and the Commons, or Gwendolyn Brooks’s Conundrum. (scholarship)
Forthcoming, New York: Cambridge U P, 2025.
Ars Poetica. (poetry)
Forthcoming, Middletown: Wesleyan U P, 2024.
Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment. (scholarship)
Cambridge: Harvard U P, 2018
That Winter the Wolf Came (poetry)
Oakland: Commune Editions, 2015.
Army of Lovers (prose)
with David Buuck. San Francisco: City Lights, 2013.
Well Then There Now (poetry)
Cambridge: Black Sparrow P, 2011.
The Transformation (prose)
Berkeley: Atelos P, 2007.
This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (poetry)
Berkeley: U of California P, 2005.
Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award.
Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (poetry)
Middletown: Wesleyan U P, 2001.
Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity
Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2001.
Response (poetry)
Los Angeles: Sun & Moon P, 1996.
National Poetry Series Award, 1995.
CO-EDITED BOOKS
A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays in Which We Ponder the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (essay collection)
with Stephanie Young. Oakland: Chain Links, 2011.
Poetry and Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (essay collection)
with Joan Retallack. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006.
American Women Poets in the Twenty-first Century. (essay collection)
with Claudia Rankine. Middletown: Wesleyan U P, 2002.
SOME RECENT WORK NOT INCLUDED IN BOOKS
“Thorns, or The Things That Humans Do in the Name of Care That Are Something Other Than Care.” (essay)
Los Angeles Review of Books, July 28, 2023.
“Major Literary Prizes.” (database)
with Claire Grossman and Stephanie Young, Post-45, 2022.
“Lyric, Essay.” (scholarship)
with Claire Grossman and Stephanie Young, Cambridge Companion to the Essay, New York: Cambridge U P, 2023.
“Literature and the State” (scholarship)
After Marx, New York: Cambridge U P, 2022.
“Literature’s Vexed Democratization.” (scholarship)
with Claire Grossman and Stephanie Young, American Literary History, 33:1, February 2021, 298-319.
“Hearing the Pandemic in Claude McKay’s ‘If We Must Die.’” (scholarship)
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 136(2), 2021, 254-257.
“Who Gets to be a Writer?” (scholarship)
with Claire Grossman and Stephanie Young, Public Books, April 15, 2021.
“On Poets and Prizes.” (scholarship)
with Stephanie Young. ASAP/J, November 11, 2020.
“Hostages” (book review)
Commune Magazine, 5, 2020.
“Top Ten.” (list)
Artforum, November 2019, p. 107-8.
“Dónde estás, Revolución?” (profile)
With Madeline Lane-McKinley, Commune Magazine, 4, 2019.
“The Paradox of Protecting Students” (polemic)
With Stephanie Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 9, 2018
“A Destruction Story.” (poetry)
Harpers, May 2018.
“How to Teach Writing.” (polemic)
Overland, 231, winter 2018.
“Gender Abolition and Ecotone War.” (scholarship)
with Joshua Clover, South Atlantic Quarterly 115:2, 2016. 291-311.
“Beyond Red and Green.” (book review)
Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. 29:2, 2016.
“The Program Era and the Mainly White Room.” (scholarship)
with Stephanie Young, Los Angeles Review of Books, September 20, 2015.
“Poets of the Revolution.” (polemic)
with C O Grossman. The Two Sided Lake. Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial, 2016, 216-219.
“The Lives of the Most Eminent State Department Poets.” (polemic)
with C O Grossman, N+1 December 11, 2015.
“Response” (polemic)
with Wendy Trevino, Tim Kreiner, Joshua Clover, Chris Chen, Jasper Bernes, Lana Turner, September 3, 2015.
“Dear Simone.” (polemic)
as Commune Editions, The Recluse 11: 2015.
three months of blog posts about poetry and politics under the name Commune Editions.
Jacket2, January-April, 2014.
#misanthropocene. (poetry)
with Joshua Clover. Oakland: Commune Editions, 2014.
“Afterword.” (scholarship)
corrected Centennial Edition of Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein, ed. Seth Perlow, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014. 107-125.
“Two Poets on Politics.” (polemic)
with Joshua Clover. Poetry Society of America website, 2011.
“One on One: on Nicholas Nixon’s ‘The Brown Sisters.’” (essay)
with Stephanie Young. Open Space: SFMOMA blog. November 2010.
“Introduction.” (essay)
Looking Up Harryette Mullen by Barbara Henning and Harryette Mullen. New York: Belladonna Books, 2011.
“How Does the Work Get Used.” (interview)
ed. Sarah Rosenthal. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2010. 298-320.
“The 95 Cent Skool.” (polemic)
with Joshua Clover. Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook. Ed Joshua Marie Wilkinson. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2010. 184-186.
“Leave the Manifesto Alone.” (polemic)
with Joshua Clover and under the name “Hate Socialist Collective.” Poetry Magazine. February (2009).
Preface to Myung Mi Kim’s Dura. (essay)
New York: Nightboat Books, 2008. 1-12.
“Poetry and Other Englishes.” (essay and a collection of poems by writers from Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the United Kingdom)
with David Buuck. boundary 2, 33:2, 2006. 3-49.
“Love Scattered, Not Concentrated Love: Bernadette Mayer and the Social Lyric.” (scholarship)
differences 12:2, 2001. 98-120.
CONFERENCES CO-ORGANIZED
Cruel Work
Mills College, winter of 2014.
Beyond Oakland
Bay Area Public School, August 2013.
Poetry and/or Revolution
UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCSC, and Bay Area Public School, October 2013.
Act Art
Mills College, spring of 2005.
Myth, Terrorism, and Justice
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, November 2002.
Human Writes: A Literary Festival and Symposium
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, November 2001.
Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary
Bard College, June 1999.
Alter-Englishes
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, September 1999.
Islands
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, September 1998. Co-coordinator.
Writing from the New Coast: First Festival of New Poetry
SUNY at Buffalo, March 31-April 4, 1993.
SOME RECENT PAPERS PRESENTED
“Claude McKay and the Archive”
Poetics/history/Theory: Imagining Archives: A Symposium, U California, Irvine, February 2020.
“What is Committed Literature Now?”
After Post-Marxism, U of California, Berkeley, December 2019
“Prestige vs the Avant-Garde”
with Stephanie Young, American Comparative Literature Association, annual meeting, March 2019.
“Litteratur: State Literatures.”
Avisen Live, Copenhagen, Denmark, July 2019.
“Foundational Funding and Prestige Literature.”
American Comparative Literature Association, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, March 2018.
“Writing Crisis.”
UCI Humanities Commons, University of California, Irvine, September 2018.
“Activism.”
Reverse: Copenhagen International Poetry Festival. Copenhagen, Denmark, August 2017.
“Klassensprachen/ Class Languages – Translations and Transformations.”
Klassensprachen, Berlin, Germany, July 2017.
“More Thoughts on the Mainly White Room.”
with Stephanie Young. The Contemporary, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.
“Contemporary Feminist Poetry and Marxist Feminism.”
co-chair and co-organizer with Amy De’Ath. American Comparative Literature Association, Harvard University, Cambridge, Masschusetts.
“The Reserve Army of the Unemployed and the Overeducated.”
keynote at Annual UCLA Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference, Los Angeles, California.
“Nature Poetry After Nature”
In Nature’s Wake: the Art and Politics of Environmental Crisis, Georgetown U., Washington DC.
“Period Style and Collaboration.”
&Now. CalArts, Valencia, California.
“Ecopoetry”
Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies, University of Texas, Austin.
“The Art of Politics.”
Austin Book Fair, Austin, Texas.
“The Politics of Poetry Production > The Politics of Poetic Form.”
Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Faculty Solidarity Across Ranks.”
with Stephanie Young, at the MLA Subconference “Non-Negotiable Sites of Struggle,” Vancouver, Canada.
“De Jaren 90 III”
Perdu, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
“Gender Abolition and Ecotone War” (written with Joshua Clover)
Linkoping U, Sweden, 2014; at the conference “Anthropocene Feminism: Center for 21st Century Studies,” University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and at “States of Nature,” U of Wisconsin Madison Sawyer seminar.
“Poetry and Politics – An Evening about Ecopoetics”
with Ida Borjel, at Poeten på hornet, Lund, Sweden
“Contemporary US Poetry and Literary Nationalism”
Center for Research in Contemporary Poetry, Aarhaus University, Denmark
“Transition’s Tender Buttons”
keynote address, at A Valentine to Gertrude Stein, Copenhagen
“Ending Capitalism: Speculations and Prospects.”
Crisis in the Cultures of Capitalism, U of California, Santa Cruz
“John Barr’s Poetic Capital.”
Capital Poetics, Cornell U, Ithaca.