Seth Abramson​​

August 22, 2016

The third book in The Metamodern Trilogy, Golden Age, will be released by BlazeVox Books on January 5, 2017. I hope you'll check it out! See the "Books" page on this site for the full cover.

July 24, 2016

In the first six months of 2016, I wrote more than forty essays for The Huffington Post covering the Democratic primary. These essays, styled as a genre of "experimental journalism" seeking alternative but equally accurate explanations for the reams of polling and electoral data produced during a national primary, were shared on Facebook more than a million times and regularly derided by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, FiveThirtyEight, The Atlantic, Rush Limbaugh, and New York Magazine, the last of which termed the work "experimental political fan-fiction," while noting too its "cult following." While a literary-art experiment with a set duration, my hope was that the work would stand on its own as a guerilla media critique, a committed political statement, and—every bit as much—an ethical journalistic enterprise issuing hard data-driven "minority reports" to the U.S. punditocracy. See the "Media" tab for more.

January 21, 2016

The urban campus of the University of New Hampshire has published an article on its English program's decision to nix conventional workshopping altogether in its creative writing courses. You can read more about the decision here. I look forward to writing much more about the new direction our program is taking in the coming months. Please stay tuned!

January 8, 2016

On January 6th, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, guest-edited by poet Douglas Kearney, was released nationwide. In less than 48 hours, it was named the #1 Hot Release in Poetry Anthologies on Amazon, and interest has remained strong. I can understand why, given the amazing lineup of writers it features!

January 7, 2016

The headline pretty much says it all. Rolling Stone was very kind to me in an article about Sturgill Simpson's outlaw country LP Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, crediting my writings with having a major influence on the album and calling me a "deep thinker" and a "philosopher." Not sure the shoe fits on either score, but it's Rolling Stone, so I'm definitely not complaining.

December 31, 2015

Three articles I wrote on Star Wars: The Force Awakens went viral, receiving 135,000 "likes" and 20,000 shares on Facebook. The articles, which traced my subjective reactions to two viewings of the film, focused on plot holes as well as the narrative arc of the Star Wars saga. The article trilogy received media coverage from Mashable, Film School Rejects, Indiewire, and elsewhere. One of my aims, to argue that earnestly self-contradictory personal reactions to a film are merely human, rather than clickbait or "bad journalism", was discussed at Film School Rejects here and on Facebook here. The essays can be read here, here, and here.

October 12, 2015

I was interviewed by National Public Radio at the No Labels: Problem Solvers convention in Manchester yesterday. Audio and a transcript is here. I told the interviewer that I'd never voted for a Republican (a streak that will continue next year)  and had mainly come to hear Bernie Sanders speak, but I couldn't resist also mentioning one of my theories about the candidacy of Donald Trump (additional articles on that below).

October 7, 2015

I wrote a multi-part essay on the metamodern presidential candidacy of Donald Trump for Metamoderna, a Scandinavian journal covering metamodernism in politics, economics, and global affairs. The parts of the essay are here: I, II, III, and IV.

October 2, 2015

I've been particularly active on Ink Node over the past few weeks. Check out this link to see some new work now online, including "My Opinion On What's Been Going On," "Your Struggle," "The Many Plots of Mine Enemies," "Stromberg,"

and "The Reason My Hair Looks So Neat All the Time."

September 25, 2015

My fifth collection of poems, DATA, is set to be released by BlazeVOX in the spring of 2016. We've now got a cover image for the collection: an award-winning sculpture by a Cornish artist, Seamus Moran, entitled "Urban Burka." It's an arresting piece that's well-suited to what I concede is a very odd poetry collection, so we're excited to be able to use it!

September 1, 2015

Our second edition of Best American Experimental Writing with Wesleyan University, Best American Experimental Writing 2016, is now open for unsolicited submissions! You can submit your work (no genre restrictions) here. Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris will be our guest editors—we couldn't be more excited! Open submissions close on November 1st, 2015. We'd love to read your work, so please consider submitting!

July 22, 2015

A poem from Metamericana recently appeared in Common-place, the journal of the American Antiquarian Society. Published by the University of Connecticut, Common-place asks authors for both a text and a "Statement of Poetic Research" describing the origin of the work. You can find a link to my Statement here, and the text of the work itself (a poem, "Genesis") at this link.

July 17, 2015

A24 Films, the film production company behind some fantastic movies from the past few years--Spring Breakers, Ex Machina, The Spectacular Now, and many others of similar quality--asked me to write three brief essays on David Foster Wallace as part of their roll-out of The End of the Tour, a DFW biopic starring Jason Segel (as Wallace) and Jesse Eisenberg (as a reporter for Rolling Stone). While these essays are not advertisements for the film, I can say that it's a movie I highly recommend. The three essays are: "To Teach As Wallace Wrote: Teaching Writing and Teaching Through Writing"; "Why We Write: David Foster Wallace and the Education of the Spirit"; and "Metamodernism 101: How David Foster Wallace Started a Cultural Revolution" (forthcoming). The movie is out nationwide on July 31st, and it's well worth a look!

July 16, 2015

I'll be writing periodic essays on metamodernism for the new Scandinavian journal Metamoderna. The first of these is a six-part piece called "Situating Zavarzadean Metamodernism." While there's admittedly some esoteric academic detritus in these essays, I'm hoping they'll also be of interest to those looking to learn more about metamodern discourse. The first of these essays is subtitled "What Is Metamodernism?", while the second is subtitled "Metamodernism Across the Disciplines".

July 13, 2015

Before The Huffington Post unceremoniously dropped Donald Trump from their political coverage--a partisan foray into the domestic political sphere that seems to me unbecoming of a media outlet--I was covering Mr. Trump via the organization's Politics page. While I (and other HuffPo columnists) are now disabled from doing so, I wrote three pieces on the presidential campaign of the GOP frontrunner while it was still considered political news by HuffPo: an essay on the announcement of his candidacy, a metamodern erasure of that announcement, and a think-piece on Trump as (inadvertent) metamodern politician.

June 25, 2015

As I've become more scarce on social media (NB: see news item a few slots below this one), I've been getting some backchannel questions about where my recent work can be found. I'll try to always keep my Facebook "author page" updated, but for those interested you can always find a good chunk of my newer work (often late drafts instead of final ones) at this link on Ink Node. Thanks to Brian Christian for creating this amazing workspace!

June 24, 2015

Dani and I will be moving to New Hampshire around June 24th. If you need to get in touch with me for any reason (e.g., to send review copies of new book releases for Huffington Post and Best American Experimental Writing consideration), just use the form on the "Contact" page (tab above) and I'll try to respond ASAP.

June 2, 2015

I've been a NewPages reader since its early days, so I was thrilled to discover a NewPages review of my collection of metamodern poetry, Metamericana! Benjamin Champagne offers a great look at the text; a quote: "Abramson's secret seems to be that a good poem places pressure on ideas in an interesting way, and a good idea places pressure on old ideas in an interesting way. Philosophy places pressure on technology and technology places pressure on philosophy. All of this interacts in a swirling and kaleidoscopic manner in Metamericana." Full review here. You can purchase Metamericana at Amazon, SPD, or BlazeVOX.

June 1, 2015

Metamodern art has become so ubiquitous in American culture that I thought that it might be time for a regular column that aggregates examples of metamodernism in film, television, and other media. You can find the second entry in this new column series here; archived entries can be found at my HuffPo page. These columns include lots of cool multimedia, so I hope you'll share them on social media if you find them worthwhile!

May 20, 2015

I've had a great time meeting and interacting with other writers on Facebook and Twitter over the years, and I owe a real debt of gratitude to the many friends and strangers who kept up with me via the two major social media platforms between 2007 and 2015--more than 9,000 people, so many of whom I admire and am fascinated by!--but even so, I've found that the resource drain of social media is a little more, these days, than I can bear. For that reason, I've made an "author page" on Facebook that I'll use for announcements, essays, and other items I hope will be of interest. Please consider "liking" the new page at this link!

March 27, 2015

My fourth collection of poetry, Metamericana, has just been published by BlazeVOX Books and its now available at both Amazon (link) and BlazeVOX (link). An excerpt and a view of the unorthodox back cover are available at either of these links. I hope you'll check them out! Metamericana is a book comprising "metamodern" texts which are simultaneously strange and readable; my hope is that, however one reacts to any individual text, no one who reads the book will be bored.

March 24, 2015

This fall I'll be joining the faculty of one of the eight colleges of the University of New Hampshire--the University's urban college in Manchester. As an Assistant Professor of English I'll be teaching creative writing, professional/technical writing, digital journalism, pre-law courses, and maybe a few other subjects as well! I'm thrilled to be moving back to one of my two home states, and can't wait to start teaching at UNH! You can find a press release regarding the announcement here.

March 20, 2015

I gave a guest lecture on recent developments in MetaMod to graduate students studying architecture at the University of Michigan. We discussed the nature of cultural paradigms and paradigm shift as well as a much more specific topic: exactly how an architect might design a multi-purpose space with first principles of "post-oscillatory metamodernism" in mind.

December 8, 2014

Grab a few friends, find a space with a decent sound system, and check out this YouTube video--a user-curated movie that uses videos by Gorillaz (Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett) as a visual accompaniment for the band's 2010 album Plastic Beach. In an article for Indiewire, I compare Plastic Beach (the movie) to the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, with key differences between the two offering a telling commentary on our time.

December 2, 2014

Metamodern poetry doesn't really look like, sound like, or do the same kind of work as contemporary postmodern poetry does--which is not to say it's a better or worse paradigmatic response to the Internet Age--but that doesn't stop it from finding a readership. You can check out some new MetaMod verse at Ink Node: "The Top 50 Moments of the 2014 Winter Olympics"; "20 Unrelated But True Statements About West London in 1999"; and "An Alphabetical Index of Significant Manic Pixie Dream Girls." These conceptual poems aim to investigate the metamodern principles illuminated by Furlani (2002), who said that metamodern lit is "plural but not ironic, fragments but not in disorder," and Zavarzadeh (1975), who said MetaMod narrative is written "in facts, not about facts."

December 1, 2014

An article I wrote advocating for the inclusion of the Badgers in the inaugural College Football Playoff went viral just a day before the CFP Committee was due to announce their second-to-last set of rankings. Published by two media outlets--SB Nation and The Huffington Post--the article ended up shared on Facebook by more than 1,300 users and "liked" by 7,000+ others; hopefully it'll help bring a deserving Badger football team back into fan discussions of the national championship!

November 30, 2014

Starting immediately, I'll be writing occasional essays for SB Nation, a sports website recently named the nation's best by Time magazine. SB Nation partners with media institutions like CBS Sports, USA Today, Comcast, and Yahoo Sports to bring sports reporting to 12 million fans a month--including fans of the Wisconsin Badgers, who I'll write about as often as I can! I'll also continue writing occasional pieces for HuffPost Sports.

November 21, 2014

In the past few weeks my "Metamericana" Indiewire column has featured a number of entries looking at manifestations of metamodernism in film; included in this slew of new essays are discussions of Birdman, Interstellar, and Too Many Cooks. I hope you'll check them out! You can also view the full archive of "Metamericana" articles here.

October 22, 2014

Hawkeye was my favorite Marvel superhero as a kid, but he's been the least popular Avenger for decades. The reason for this is that no one has yet found a way to write the character as well as he deserves to be written. Well, it looks like Matt Fraction and David Aja have found a way(!), and it's a pretty unusual one: Hawkeye as a normcore take on the superhero genre. I talk more about the Fraction/Aja Hawkeye series here.

October 20, 2014

Timothy Green, editor of Rattle, asked me to write a series of essays explaining metamodernism in (as much as possible) lay terms. I gave it my best shot; you can find the results here (I, II, and III). Hope you'll take a look and see if it makes sense! [Image at Left: The front cover of Rattle #45, Fall 2014].

October 10, 2014

Best American Experimental Writing 2014 has a release date! You can pre-order a copy now and should have it in hand by Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, the 2015 edition of the series (with Guest Editor Douglas Kearney) is now reading unsolicited submissions, so head on over to the Wesleyan University Press BAX page and check out the submission guidelines! We'd love to take a look at your innovative poetry and prose.

October 3, 2014

If you're a fan of both children's educational programming and thinking about the Apocalypse, Eoin Duffy's animated short The Missing Scarf is right up your alley. I write about this remarkable seven-minute video in a new Indiewire article.

September 22, 2014

I've got a piece of metamodern conceptualism up at Nailed Magazine called "T.C. Boyle, 'On So-Called Metamodernism.'" It's a strange one, but I hope you'll consider checking it out! 

August 27, 2014

I've been trying to figure out the ins and outs of a new online arts platform called NewHive. So far, I've put up three poems in the "Hit It" series (I, II, III). The series uses NewHive's great multimedia capabilities to conjoin prose narratives and video epiphanies. Each "Hit It" poem concludes with a "surprise" video that aims to shed new light on the text that precedes it.

August 26, 2014

One of the projects I worked on this summer was writing a "Metamodernist Manifesto" outlining a few important principles in this new cultural paradigm. The text version of the manifesto includes an Introduction and five parts (I, II, III, IV, and V), while the video manifesto has three parts (I, II, III) and aims to introduce some multimedia exemplars of the metamodern sensibility. The manifesto also incorporates a two-part scholarly article (I, II) with misattributed authorship.

May 31, 2014

My wife and I will both be giving talks at Northwestern at the end of this month; I'll be speaking to students as part of a Social Media and Writing panel, while Danielle, a poet and fiction-writer who's currently a Grants Manager for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Surgery, will be on a panel entitled "Not Teaching." Looking forward to it!

May 17, 2014

We couldn't be happier to announce that one of the poets Jesse and I most admire, Douglas Kearney, has agreed to be Guest Editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2015. The official announcement (along with submission information for BAX15) can be found on the Wesleyan University Press site.

May 17, 2014

The Best American Experimental Writing series will continue well into the future! We're thrilled to announce our long-term partnership with Wesleyan University Press, publisher of one of the longest-running poetry series in the United States. The Guest Editor for BAX 2015 will be Douglas Kearney, and we couldn't be more excited! Details about BAX 2015 (including submission guidelines) can be found here.

May 15, 2014

Both Country Music Television (Link) and Pitchfork (Link) have noted the influence of essays on metamodernism on one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2014, the fantastic Metamodern Sounds in Country Music by Sturgill Simpson. Simpson himself has remarked upon the link in interviews (Link) and during live concerts. Metamodern Sounds in Country Music has earned Simpson a nomination for Best Emerging Artist at the 2014 Americana Honors & Awards celebration. 

May 11, 2014

Boost House has just published the first metamodern literary anthology ever, appropriately titled The YOLO Pages, and it's worth some serious consideration as an historic step in the emergence of metamodernism in the United States. I do my best to contextualize and analyze the anthology in my review.

May 10, 2014

Many thanks to Joseph Millar and the Council of Wisconsin Writers for awarding my third collection, Thievery, second place for the 2014 Edna Meudt Prize. In his Judge's Citation, Millar says "the tone and syntax of Thievery are deceptively simple, given the vast reach of the book's speculations--which, among other things, probe the human mind in the surreal light of its ordinary domestic circumstances." He adds, "There's an ominous hallucinatory aspect to many of these poems, wherein time and place zoom off the page." Congratulations to the other poets named at the link above! [Pictured to the left: Joseph Millar, 2014 Meudt Prize Judge.]

May 7, 2014

Omnidawn has just formally announced the list of authors selected by Cole Swensen, Jesse Damiani, and myself for BAX 2014. The list includes such writers as Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Maxine Chernoff, Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, Lisa Jarnot, Ron Padgett, Vanessa Place, Ed Roberson, Anne Waldman, and Lynn Xu, along with seventy more remarkably talented contemporary authors. We promise this will be a must-read! BAX 2014 drops early this autumn. [Pictured to the left: BAX 2014 contributor Charles Bernstein.]

April 26, 2014

Many thanks to Matt Mauch and The Maeve's Sessions for inviting me to join the 5th Great Twin Cities Poetry Read! I had a great time, though I admit to some nervousness at reading a metamodern poem ("Wii") with such a large crowd present! Fortunately I managed not to trip over my tongue, and I was deeply honored to share a stage with so many remarkable poets. Video of the event is slated to go up on YouTube eventually, so I'll link to a video of my reading of "Wii" as soon as I can! [Pictured at left: Augsburg College, GTCPR5 host.]

April 21, 2014

Using data collected through the MFA Research Project, I've written an essay detailing the widening gender gap in U.S. poetry--and the results, presented here in a series of pie charts, are likely to surprise many. Check out the full story.

April 10, 2014

VJ Metamodernism has remixed one of my metamodern verse experiments using Kid Ink. It only seems appropriate, as the poem's already a data remix from DATA! Hear the remix here.

April 7, 2014

A lot of people are pretty exercised about James Franco, and that collective energy only ramped up when it was discovered that he sent several inappropriate texts to a teenage tourist. In this essay for Indiewire, I look at some of the problems with our Franco obsession, including our presumption that we can or should think ourselves knowledgable about his character.

March 14, 2014

I'm not normally a South Park fan, and I only irregularly play role-playing videogames, but when I found out that the new RPG from Trey Parker and Matt Stone was a metamodern extravaganza--an RPG about RPGs--I had to play it. I wrote a little bit about the experience in this article for Indiewire.

March 15-23, 2014

I feel deeply lucky that, due to some flukishly low airfare costs and a friend of a friend living in Tianjin, Danielle, Jesse, and I were able to take a week-long trip to China. It'd be impossible to detail everything we did, though some of it is captured in my poem "White Privilege." Suffice to say that we saw almost everything you can see in Beijing in a week (the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, the Bird's Nest, Silk Street, and several other sites) while also making it out to Xi'an (the Terracotta Army and a deservedly famous Muslim Quarter) and spending a couple days biking through the rural villages of the gorgeous Yangshuo region (pictured at left). It was an experience I'll never forget--or ever properly process.

March 12, 2014

I just wrapped up a three-part interview on metamodernism with the website As It Ought to Be. Editor Kirsten Clodfelter asked me a slough of questions--about the term itself; about Shia LaBeouf; about metamodern verse--in an effort to figure out just what all this means for contemporary poetry in the United States. Here's a link to the final part of the interview (a link to the first two parts can be found at the top of the page).

February 28, 2014

I just saw one of the best films I've ever seen--and it's without a doubt a metamodern artifact. More on Paolo Sorrentino's extraordinary The Great Beauty in this "Metamericana" essay.

February 26-28, 2014

At 9PM on Wednesday, February 26, I'll be reading with Hoa Nguyen, Roger Reeves, Dara Wier, Rachel Yoder, and Matthew Zapruder at The Sole Repair Shop in Seattle (1001 E. Pike St.) as part of the 2014 AWP Conference & Bookfair. At 10PM on February 28, I'll be reading for Ink Node at Left Bank Books (92 Pike St.). The readers for this second reading are yet to be announced, but I'm expecting a large and diverse line-up. I hope you'll consider checking out one or both of these events!

February 14, 2014

As part of my regular "Metamericana" column at Indiewire, I call "metamodernism" upon seeing The Lego Movie (Link). A sequel to this remarkable film has already been announced.

February 12, 2014

I was asked to join a conversation on Iowa Public Radio about explosive allegations that the Iowa Writers' Workshop was funded, for several years, by an anti-Communist propaganda campaign run by the CIA. Full audio of the interview is here.

February 7, 2014

This year, entries in The Huffington Post contemporary poetry review series have covered the metamodern poetics of Steve Roggenbuck (Link); collections by Cynthia Arrieu-King, David Bartone, T. Zachary Cotler, Gro Dahle, Kate Greenstreet, Julie Joosten, Gina Myers, Normandy Sherwood, Ron Silliman, Rachel Zucker, and Steve Zultanski (Link); and new work from Tim Earley, Sara Nicholson, and Ron Padgett (Link).

January 31, 2014

Critics of Martin Scorsese's latest film, The Wolf of Wall Street, have not unreasonably termed it "douchebag porn," owing to its gratuitous depiction of penny-stock hustler Jordan Belfort's sex- and drug-fueled career on Wall Street in the 1980s. But was Scorsese actually aiming for High Art? That's a possibility I explore in my new essay for Indiewire--and the first entry in my regular column for the Press Play site, "Metamericana"--"Is Martin Scorsese's Latest Offering Unbelievable on Purpose?"

January 25, 2014

Along with my Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing, poet Jesse Damiani, I read poems from DATA, my new manuscript, for the Trobar Ric Reading Series run by the grad program in creative writing at the University of Mississippi. I'm hoping to have some videos from the reading up shortly.

November 5, 2013

This November, I'll be delivering what's likely to be the first-ever lecture on metamodernistic conceptualism in American verse. I say "first ever" because metamodernism--first written of in Europe (in relation to literary fiction and the material arts) in 2010--is a tendency that's only just now emerging in contempoary poetry. I'll be speaking on the form and theory of poetic metamodernism, and reading from both my proto-metamodernistic poetry collection, Thievery, as well as DATA, a new manuscript of metamodernistic conceptualism (excerpt).

October 30, 2013

On October 30th, I did an hour-long radio interview with poet and editor J.P. Dancing Bear, host of the "Out of Our Minds" program on California's KKUP 91.5 FM in Cupertino. The talk was wide-ranging, and involved not only readings from my third poetry collection, but also a discussion of cronyism in American poetry, strategies for writing poetry reviews, the possibilities explored by metamodernistic conceptualism, and much, much more. You can find audio of the interview here.

August 13, 2013

A discussion of poetry advocacy in the United States, along with a "non-exhaustive and non-authoritative" list of some of American poetry's most ardent advocates, went viral on The Huffington Post, with more than 3,800 Facebook "likes," 500 Facebook shares, and 200 retweets. The list was cited by organizations ranging from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs to CLMP, from The Academy of American Poets to The Poetry Foundation. {Pictured at left: performance poet Marc Smith, the father of "slam poetry" in the United States.}

July 26, 2013

My review of the Netflix original series "Orange is the New Black," based on Piper Kerman's memoir of the same name, was published in The Washington Post. It discusses how the show can be an important teaching tool for those with a limited understanding of the challenges faced by parolees.

July 23, 2013

I've got two essays out on musician, comedian, and slam poet Reggie Watts. The first is in Indiewire (link), and the second in The Huffington Post (link). Both position Watts as one of the premiere metamodernistic artists working in America today.

June 21, 2013

This June I'll be presenting a conference paper entitled "A People's History of the Program Era: Theorizing the Creative Writing Movement Using Data-Driven Research Models" at the Critical Pedagogy & the Creative Writing Workshop Conference at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.

June 20, 2013

A defense of contemporary American poetry entitled "Why Is Contemporary American Poetry So Good?" has gone viral on The Huffington Post, with over 1,600 Facebook "likes" and more than 400 Facebook shares, as well as mentions by The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The Poetry Foundation, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, and others.

June 10, 2013

Poet and University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa professor Hank Lazer, in a chapter-long essay in The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), calls the MFA Research Project "a daring, data-rich endeavor." The essay, entitled "American Poetry and Its Institutions," appears in the just-released edition of the anthology, edited by University of Illinois-Chicago professor Jennifer Ashton.

May 30, 2013

In the largest-ever data release in the seven-year history of the project, The MFA Research Project (MRP) has released several new multi-year studies chronicling the appliction decisions of fiction applicants (more than 1,300 applicants over four years), poetry applicants (nearly 700 applicants over four years), and applicants in both of the two major creative writing genres (more than 2,500 over five years). You can find all the new data here.

April 12, 2013

I'll be reading at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa on March 20th at 7:00PM. I'll be reading selections from both Northerners and my newest collection of poems, Thievery.

March 21, 2013

This March I'll be giving a guest lecture at the University of Amsterdam on the history of creative writing as a discipline and the institutionalization of creative writing during the Program Era. Special emphasis will be placed on the future of graduate creative writing programs outside the United States. P.C. Hoofthuis, zaal 1.04, Spuistraat 134, 7:00PM. Sponsored by the University of Amsterdam English Department.

March 20, 2013

Jesse Damiani and I will be reading at The English Bookshop in Amsterdam at 8:00PM on March 20th. I'll be reading selections from my new book, Thievery.

March 14-31, 2013

I'll be travelling to Amsterdam, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland with the Co-Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing, Jesse Damiani--for many reasons, but in part to give a poetry reading and guest lecture abroad. As a bonus, we'll be taking a trip well north of the Artic Circle in hopes of seeing the Northern Lights. (Update: Mission successful!)

March 15, 2013

Two poems from Thievery, "Hy-Vee" and "Poem for Battered Man," will appear this fall in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, edited by Deborah Ager and M.E. Silverman. Other poets in the anthology include (along with countless other fine poets) Charles Bernstein, Stephen Burt, Amy Gerstler, Arielle Greenberg, Jane Hirshfield, Ilya Kaminsky, Lisa Olstein, Matthew Zapruder, and Rachel Zucker. The 212-poem, 110-poet, 275-page anthology should drop sometime in September or October of 2013.

March 6, 2013

I'll be reading from Thievery, my new collection, at the Thrush Poetry Journal/Barn Owl Review "Birds of a Feather" reading at 8:00PM at the Elephant & Castle Pub in Boston.

March 8, 2013

My third collection, Thievery, is now available! It can be found at the University of Akron Press table (Table H1) at the AWP Bookfair. I'll be signing copies there from 1:00PM to 2:00PM on Friday, March 8th. Hope to see you then!

January 15, 2013

Just found out that the MRP got a mention in James English's The Global Future of English Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). English notes that MRP data on the worldwide number of graduate creative writing programs is more accurate than data from the chief trade organization in the U.S. dealing with creative writing, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). It's true; since its inception in 2006, the MRP database of graduate creative writing programs has consistently been 20% to 40% larger than any other such database. English's book can be found here. The MRP is here.

January 3, 2013

Unexpectedly, an essay I wrote on the merits of Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, which took film critics to task for taking the new film out of the context of Tolkien's larger vision, went viral--with over 20,000 "likes" and 1,000 comments on The Huffington Post and almost 5,000 shares on Facebook. You can read the full article at this link.