Area chair
The Poetry and Poetry Studies area examines all aspects of poetry, including critical perspectives on poetic craft and creative readings of original works. This area encourages diverse and interdisciplinary approaches that expand our understanding of poetry’s impact on modern culture, and proposals are welcome to explore numerous styles and subgenres of poetry, such as ecopoetics, spoken word, language poetry, received forms, and others. From Amanda Gorman reciting “The Hill We Climb” at the presidential inauguration, to the video game Elegy for a Dead World, where players are tasked with writing their own poems to reflect on the game’s contents, poetry persists as a mode to think through and speak to the contemporary moment. This area welcomes submissions on all the ways poetry does so from established scholars, current students, and all other serious readers and writers of poetry.