My work focuses on the evolution of the American avant-garde throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, paying close attention to how writers as diverse in their subjects and styles as Russell Atkins, Erica Hunt, Lyn Hejinian, Jackson Mac Low, and John Ashbery have sought to establish new perceptions of reality by engaging in experimental, innovative, and conceptual uses of language. This interest in the intersection between poetic language social practices opens my work to influences from modern rhetorical theory — especially from “New Rhetoric” theorists like Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Susanne Langer, and Kenneth Burke. By studying avant-garde poetry as a rhetorical act aimed at changing the way individuals think and speak about the world, my research demonstrates how texts that are often ignored in the mainstream poetry community work to establish (and expand) the very conditions that make concepts like “poetry” and “community” possible in the first place.

*For further info, please see my full CV, which you can find here.