I am the Divisional Dean of Humanities and the Milliman Endowed Chair of Humanities at the University of Washington, Seattle. In addition to English, I hold appointments at UW in the Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature; and the Program of the Comparative History of Ideas.
I teach and study poetry. I specialize in American poetry from 1910 onwards, but my interests are wide ranging, extending back in time to the Classical world and roaming as far as Russia and Korea.I am fascinated by poetry’s many overlaps and entanglements with other art forms–music, dance, painting–and I am particularly drawn to times and places when poets break with tradition and seek to expand the boundaries of the sayable and thinkable.
I have published three books, most recently Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetry (2013), and more than forty essays and articles on poetry and poetics.
I am from Lexington, Kentucky, and have degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Universities. I have been a Rhodes Scholar and a Fulbright Scholar, and I am currently the Poetry Editor for the scholarly journal Contemporary Literature.