Conference Announcement

Reimagining the Poet-Critic: Practice, Pedagogy, Poetics


This conference invites participation in a series of dialogues about the role of the poet-scholar. As a practitioner of poetry or other “imaginative” writing and more theoretical or critical work, the poet-critic or poet-scholar works both inside and outside the university. How do these two activities come together to affect the reading and writing practices of poet-critics and their readership? Since many poet-critics are read within college classrooms or are themselves professors or teachers, we are interested in the pedagogical implications of their writing practices. The conference is an occasion for dialogue across genres, disciplines, readerships and pedagogical practices and focuses on the ways writing practices can encourage creative and critical thinking.
The conference consists of six panels with three papers and invited respondents; a pedagogy colloquium; and poetry readings. Respondents will consist of invited guests and UCSC faculty.

Our Guest Respondents

Guest Respondents:

CRAIG DWORKIN is the author of Signature-Effects (Ghos-Ti, 1997), Reading the Illegible (Northwestern, 2003), Dure (Cuneiform, 2004), Strand (Roof, 2005), and Parse (Atelos, 2008), and the editor of, among others, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (Chicago, 2009). He teaches at the University of Utah and curates two online archives: Eclipse and The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing.

DAVID LAU teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Cabrillo College. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, New Orleans Review, Wildlife, and other magazines. His book of poems, Virgil and the Mountain Cat was published by UC Press in 2009. He co-edits Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry and Opinion with Cal Bedient.

K. SILEM MOHAMMAD is the author of the poetry collections Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003); A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004); Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008); and The Front (Roof Books, 2009); as well as the chapbooks Hovercraft (Kenning, 2000) and Monsters (Abraham Lincoln, 2006). Mohammad is an associate professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Philosophy at Southern Oregon University.

VANESSA PLACE is a writer and lawyer. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence (Le Figues, 2005), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), Statement of Fact (Publishing the Unpublishable/Ubu, 2008), Notes on Conceptualisms with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling, 2009). Other work has appeared in Northwest Review, Northridge Review, Film Comment, Contemporary Literary Criticism, 4th Street: A Poetry Bimonthly, LA Weekly Literary Supplement, Five Fingers Review, and n/Oulipo. She is a co-founder of Les Figues Press.

SINA QUEYRAS is the author of Slip (ECW, 2001), Teethmarks (Nightwood, 2004), Lemon Hound (Coach House, 2006), and Expressway (Coach House, forthcoming). Lemon Hound won the Lambda and the Pat Lowther awards for poetry. She is also the editor of Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea, 2005). She teaches at Concordia University in Montreal, is a contributing editor for the online literary journal Drunken Boat, and maintains Lemon Hound, a blog of contemporary arts and letters.

JULIANA SPAHR has published three books of poetry, including Response (Sun & Moon, 1995), This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (California, 2005), and Well Then There Now (Salt, forthcoming). She is the author of a book of criticism, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Alabama, 2001), and a memoir, The Transformation (Atelos, 2007). She is an Associate Professor at Mills College.



ROB WILSON is a Professor of Literature at UCSC. Automat: Unsettling Anglo-Global Poetics from Asia/Pacific Lines of Flight is forthcoming from the University of Hawai’i Press. His study Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was published this year with Harvard University Press; and a collection of cultural criticism from Asia/Pacific (co-edited with Christopher Connery) The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization appeared with New Pacific Press/ North Atlantic Books in fall 2007. He has published poems in various journals from Tinfish, Taxi, Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, and Central Park to New Republic, Ploughshares, Partisan Review, and Poetry.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies, the Puknat Endowment, and the Literature Department.