Faculty Profiles

• 
• Evelyn Soto
• ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
• At Rutgers Since: 2023
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• Office: Murray Hall, Room 013, College Ave Campus
• Office Hours:

  AY 26-27 Research Leave

• Primary Areas of Specialization: Latina/o/x literature C19 - present, hemispheric American literature, translation studies, archival theories & methods
• Field of Interest: Gender & Sexuality, Hemispheric, Latina/o/x, Nineteenth-Century American, Translation
• About:

  Evelyn Soto’s research and teaching works across the fields of Latina/o/x literary and cultural studies, hemispheric literary studies, and transnational histories of race. She is currently at work on a first book manuscript titled Black Legend Revolutions: Forming Early Latinx Political Imaginaries. This project situates Latinx political pasts within a new literary and cultural geography: of densely interconnected revolutionary movements across the Caribbean, continental South America, and US during and beyond the historical uprisings of 1808-1826. By close reading an interdisciplinary and multilingual range of literary, legal, and historical texts, the book assembles an archive of early Latinx political imaginaries that contest enduring narratives of US exceptionalism and myths of “mixed” racial democracy in Latin American nationalisms.

  Professor Soto’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences Research Council, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chiricú Journal, Latinx Literature in Transition, Latina Histories and Cultures, and Pasados Journal, among others. She currently serves on the MLA forum executive committee for Race & Ethnicity Studies. 

• Awards:
  • Institute for Citizens & Scholars Career Enhancement Fellow, 2023-2024
  • CHCI - ACLS Fellow, Rice Humanities Research Center, 2022-2023
  • Awardee, ACLS Project Development Grant, 2021-2022
  • César Chávez Fellowship in Latin American, Latina/o, and Caribbean Studies, Dartmouth College, 2018-2019
• Other Publications:

  Articles and Book Chapters

  • "Passing Time: Latinx Racialization, Modernist Satire, and the Captivity Narrative." eds. John Alba Cutler and Marissa K. López, Latinx Literature in Transition, 1848--1992. Cambridge University Press; 2025:178-194.
  • "The Right to Escape in We Are Not from Here." Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, vol. 9 no. 1, 2024, p. 16-34. 
  • "Translating the Tapada's Veil in Who Would Have Thought It?" in Latina Histories and Cultures: Feminist Readings and Recoveries of Archival Knowledge, eds. Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla. Arte Público Press, 2023. p. 23-41. 

  Special Issue

  • Co-editor with Jesse Alemán. Against the Past / Contra Pasados, special issue of Pasados Journal. Co-author of the introduction. Forthcoming. 

  Reviews and Other Publications:

  • "Provocation #4, Keyword: 'Legacy.'" Latinx Revolutionary Horizons and  Expanding the Latinx Studies Field Imaginary. ASAP Review/Provocations. Ed. David J. Vázquez. 2025. 
  • Soto, Evelyn. Review of Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity, by John C. Havard. Intertexts, vol. 26 no. 1, 2022, p. 146-149.
  • Soto, Evelyn. Review of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States, by Lauren F. Klein. Early American Literature, vol. 57 no. 1, 2022, p. 292-297. 

• Education: PhD, University of Pennsylvania | MA, University of Pennsylvania | BA, summa cum laude, Cornell University

• 
• Evie Shockley
• Director of Writers House
• Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English
• At Rutgers Since: 2005
• EESCV_2026.pdf
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• Phone Number: (848) 932-7909
• Office: Murray Hall, Room 202, College Ave Campus
• Office Hours:

  Fall 2026: Tuesdays, 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. & by appt.

• Primary Areas of Specialization: African American and African Diaspora Literature, especially Poetry; Twentieth Century/Contemporary Poetry and Poetics; Black Feminist Thought; Gender and Sexuality; Black Study; Visual Culture
• Field of Interest: African-American & Diaspora, Creative Writing Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender & Sexuality, Poetry & Poetics, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century
• About:

  Professor Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023).  Her books have been recognized with a number of awards: the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize; and suddenly we won an NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.  She is also the editor of the Norton Library edition of Incicdents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Written by Herself), by Harriet Jacobs (2025).

  Shockley's intellectual and creative work takes a variety of forms.  Her current research on "Black Graphics" concerns the strategies Black poets and other artists (literary and visual) have employed during the recent period characterized by the dominance of "colorblindness" ideology.  Articles related to this project have appeared in New Literary History, The Black Scholar, and Contemporary Literature; another is forthcoming in African American Review.  Other scholarly and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century African American and African Diaspora literatures, Black feminist thought, and contemporary poetry and poetics in the US and beyond.  She has published numerous essays on these subjects in academic journals, edited volumes, and broader audience publications, such as How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill; Furious Flower: Seeding the Future; The New Emily Dickinson Studies; Harriet; The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time; LARB; Literary Hub; The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry; Jacket2; and Boston Review, among others.  She has written forewords and afterwords for works by or about Audre Lorde, M. NourbeSe Philip, Tyrone Williams, and David ("Dave the Potter") Drake.  From 2021-2025, she served as Editor for Poetry (scholarship) at Contemporary Literature.  Her poetry has appeared nationally -- in publications like Kenyon Review, Obsidian, Poem-a-Day, The 1619 Project, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Adi, Lana Turner, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, Torch Literary Arts, and Poetry Daily -- and internationally, with pieces translated into French, Spanish, Polish, and Slovenian.  Honors for the body of her poetry include the Academy of American Poets' Academy Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize.

  ---

  From her teaching philosophy:

  "In my classroom, I make every effort to show students clearly how passionate I am about the texts and ideas I'm teaching—how much a poem, a novel, or a literary movement can mean to me and many others.  They appreciate this, I think, in part because it gives them permission to feel passionate about their own relationships to texts, in turn.  When that sense of the power of literature is circulating in the room, it makes it much easier for me to make palpable for them the historical and cultural significance of the works, on one hand, or to convince them of the importance of a line break or an element of plot, on the other.  What I appreciate most is that this becomes a feedback loop, wherein my own experience of texts that have become too familiar from frequent teaching is reenergized by the enthusiasms (or engaged resistance) my students express."

• Book(s):
  
  a half-red sea
  
  Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry
  
  semiautomatic
  
  suddenly we
  
  The Gorgon Goddess
  
  the new black
• Undergraduate Courses Taught:
  • Advanced Poetry (Creative Writing)
  • Black Poetry
  • Black Speculative Fiction
  • Black Women Writers
  • Black Women's Experimental Writing
  • Blackness and Visual Culture
  • Contemporary Narratives of Slavery
  • Form & Technique in Poetry (Creative Writing)
  • Domestic Ideology and African American Literature
  • Introduction to Creative Writing
  • The Black Fantastic: African American Speculative Fiction
  • Twenty-First Century African American Literature
• Graduate Courses Taught:
  • The African-American Long Poem
  • Black Aesthetics in Theory and Practice
  • Black Power/Black Aesthetics (with Professor Donna Murch, History)
  • The Craft of Poetry: Voice (MFA course at Rutgers-Newark)
  • Slavery in the African American Imagination
  • Slavery in the Black Feminist Imagination
  • Poetry, Poetics, and the (In)visibility of Race
  • Black Feminist Poethics
• Awards:
  • Academy Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, 2024
  • Camargo Foundation Residency Fellowship, 2024
  • Finalist, National Book Award in Poetry (suddenly we), 2024
  • NAACP Image Award in Poetry (suddenly we), 2024
  • Shelley Memorial Award, 2023
  • Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, 2019
  • Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship, 2018-2019
  • Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry (semiautomatic), 2018
  • Finalist, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (semiautomatic), 2018
  • Finalist, LA Times Book Prize in Poetry (semiautomatic), 2018
  • Stephen Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, African American Literature and Culture Society, 2015
  • Rutgers Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award, 2013-2014
  • Holmes National Poetry Prize, Princeton University, 2012
  • Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry (the new black), 2012
  • Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, Rutgers University, 2011
  • Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, Rutgers University, 2011
  • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2008
  • Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Program Fellowship, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2007
  • Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship, 2007-8 (declined)
• Other Publications:
  • “What Cave Canem Means: An Aesthetic History,” in Cambridge History of African American Poetry, ed. Keith Leonard, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2026).
  • “Nothing New,” in How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill, ed. Jericho Brown and Darlene Taylor, Amistad/Harper Collins, 2023.
  • "Race, Experiments, and the Black Avant-Garde," in Furious Flower: Seeding the Future, ed. Joanne Gabbin, Northwestern University Press, 2020. 69-82.
  • "On Seeing and Reading the Nothing: Poetry and Blackness Visualized," New Literary History 50.4 (Autumn 2019): 499-528.
  • “Coloring Dickinson: Race, Influence, and Lyric Dis-reading,” in The New Emily Dickinson Studies, ed. Michelle Kohler, Cambridge University Press, 2019. 258-279.
  • "A Letter to David Drake from a Friend and a Relation," in Where Is All My Relation? The Poetics of Dave the Potter, ed. Michael A. Chaney, Oxford University Press, 2018. 51-57.
  • “Difficult Bees as Difficult Does,” in The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time, ed. Charles Altieri and Nicholas Nace, Northwestern University Press, 2017. 227-234.
  • “‘Please feel free to perform the text’: Making Slavery Work in Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Big House / Disclosure,” Special Issue on Black Experimental Poetry, David Marriot, guest ed., The Black Scholar 47.1 (2017): 38-52.
  • “Race, Reception, and Claudia Rankine’s American Lyric,” in “Reconsidering Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. A Symposium, Part I,” ed. Daniel Worden, Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 January 2016. 
  • “The Black Arts Movement and Black Aesthetics,” The Cambridge Companion to American Modernist Poetry, ed. Walter Kalaidjian, Cambridge UP (2014).
  • “Is Zong! Conceptual Poetry? Yes, It Isn’t.” Dialogues with NourbeSe Philip, ed. Janet Neigh, Jacket2, September 2013
  • “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slave: Visual Artistry as Agency in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery,” Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon, ed. Lovalerie King and Shirley C. Moody, Indiana UP (2013).
  • “Going Overboard: African American Poetic Innovation and the Middle Passage,” Contemporary Literature 52.4, Spring 2012
  • “On the Nature of Ed Roberson’s Poetics,” Callaloo 33.3, Fall 2010
  • “The Haunted Houses of New Orleans: Gothic Homelessness and African American Experience,” Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America, ed. Keith Wailoo, Karen O’Neil, Roland Anglin, and Jeffrey Dowd, Rutgers UP, 2010
• Visiting Professorships :
  • Bain-Swiggett Visitng Professorship in Poetry, Princeton University -- Fall 2021
  • Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar -- 2020-2021
  • Visiting Hurst Professor in Poetry, Washington University in St. Louis -- Spring 2019
• Membership Affiliations:
  • Modern Languages Association (Executive Council, 2017-2020)
  • American Poetry and Poetics Association
  • American Studies Association
  • Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
  • Langston Hughes Society
  • PEN American Center
• Other Information of Interest:
  • "Evie Shockley on Ed Roberson ('Open / Back Up (breadth of field)')" -- Close Reading, with host Kamran Javadizadeh
  • "Evie Shockley, suddenly we" -- New Books in African American Studies, with host Brittney Edmonds
  • "Courage to Speak, Courage to Hear" -- Poetry Centered, University of Arizona Poetry Center Podcast, Season 6, Episode 3
  • The People's Holiday -- jazz & poetry collaboration with Christian McBride, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Program
  • "Gulf Coast Poets Read for Katrina Relief" - Writers at Rutgers Reading Series 
    by Evie Shockley (Future Traditions Magazine, Issue 1)
  • “A Poet Transforms her Classes into Community”
• Education: Duke University - M.A., Ph.D. University of Michigan - J.D. Northwestern University - B.A.

• 
• Kristin Grogan
• Assistant Professor of English
• At Rutgers Since: 2019
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• Office: Murray Hall, Room 007, College Ave Campus
• Primary Areas of Specialization: Poetry and poetics, modernism, American literature, queer literature, gender and sexuality, Marxism
• Field of Interest: Gender & Sexuality, Poetry & Poetics, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century
• About:

  My research and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, modernism, queer literature, Marxism (especially Marxist feminism) and American literature. I'm particularly interested in the social life of modern poetry. 

  My first book, Stitch, Unstitch: Modernist Poetry and the World of Work, is out with Columbia University Press (Modernist Latitudes Series). You can read an extract from Chapter Three, on Black labor unions and the blues poem, in Lit Hub and a Q&A about the book at the Columbia University Press blog.

  Stitch, Unstitch argues that modernist poetry was shaped by a deep entanglement with a world governed by work and work-based values, and that the richness of this history has been obscured by the dominant narrative that describes modernism in terms of the emergence of a professional literary class. Emphasizing unseen and undervalued labors and braiding close reading with a Marxist-feminist approach, Stitch, Unstitch argues that modernist poetry is a formally complex archive of thought about the meaning of work and life beyond work.

  My essays have appeared in American Literary History, American Literature, Critical Quarterly, Post45, as well as several edited collections, including The Cambridge Companion to the Poem. With David Hobbs, I am the editor of a special cluster of Post 45 Contemporaries on the New York School poet Bernadette Mayer. For that issue, I wrote a short essay on Mayer's late poetry, gardening, property, and the Georgic.

  I've published reviews and interviews in public-facing venues such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and interviews elsewhere - with Sarah Schulman in The White Review and Eileen Myles in The Oxonian Review. You can listen to me talk about the poem "Poet's Work" by Lorine Niedecker on the podcast Close Readings and about Ezra Pound and fascist poetry on This Guy Sucked.

  My current projects include a short book of creative criticism on Sylvia Plath's Ariel, under advance contract with Amherst College Press in their Re/Verse series. With Christian Gelder, I'm co-editing a special issue of Women's Writing on the poet Laura Riding. I'm in the early stages of a new project, tentatively titled "Minor Action and Collective Life", about social interdependence and the lyric poem since 1968.

  I did my undergraduate work in English and French at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. I then did my DPhil at Exeter College, Oxford, where I was a Clarendon Scholar, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. 

• Books (additional):

  Stitch, Unstitch: Modernist Poetry and the World of Work (Columbia University Press, 2025)

  https://cup.columbia.edu/book/stitch-unstitch/9780231219648/

   

  

• Undergraduate Courses Taught:

  Modernist Poetry
  Queer Poetry
  American Poetry Since 1945
  Art Against Work (Honors College)
  Queer Literature before Stonewall
  The New York School
  Poetry and Daily Life
  The Great Depression

• Graduate Courses Taught:

  Queer Poetry and Poetics
  (With Ann Coiro) Early Modern/Modernism
  How to Read a Poem (Convener)
  American Literature and Working Life

• Awards:

  Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education, Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences
  Faculty Fellow, "The Commons", Center for Cultural Analysis, 2021-2
  Junior Research Fellowship, St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, 2018-2019
  Clarendon Scholarship, University of Oxford, 2014-2018

• Other Publications:

  Articles

  "Thorns Served on Honey: Lyric Difference on Lola Ridge's 'The Ghetto.'" American Literary History. Vol. 35, no. 4 (2023): 1617-1637.

  “Langston Hughes and the Exemplary Blues Poem.” Critical Quarterly, Special Issue on Historical Poetics, eds. Sean Pryor and Ben Etherington. Vol. 61, no. 1 (May 2019): 54-66.

  “Langston Hughes’s Constructivist Poetics.” American Literature. Vol. 90, no. 3 (September 2018): 585-612.

  “Niedecker’s Gift: The Poetics of Work in ‘For Paul and Other Poems.’” Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory. Vol. 28, no. 3 (August 2017): 255-274.

   “Money on My Mind: Gertrude Stein’s Meditations.” Dibur. Vol. 5: Special Issue on Poetic Currency, ed. Adriana X. Jacobs (Spring 2018): 7-19.

  “Three Ways of Looking at a Canto: Navigating Canto 108.” Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary. Vol. 10: Astern in the Dinghy: Special Issue on Ezra Pound’s Thrones, ed. Alexander Howard, (2018): 329-354.

  Book Chapters

  "Image". Cambridge Companion to the Poem, ed. Sean Pryor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

  “Stein’s Immaterial Labors.” Modernist Work: Modernity, Labor, and the Work of Art, eds. John Attridge and Helen Rydstrand, London: Bloomsbury, 2019.

  “Pound’s Lynxes: On Canto 79.” Readings in The Cantos, ed. Richard Parker, Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, forthcoming 2020.

  “Ezra Pound and Silvio Gesell.” A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics, eds. Roxana Preda and Ralf Lüfter, Bautz, 2018.

  “Listening to the Late Cantos.” Sounding Modernism: Rhythm, Acoustics, and Sonic Mediation in Literature and Film. Eds. Helen Groth, Penelope Hone, and Julian Murphet, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

• Education: DPhil Oxford, 2018

Read more: Grogan, Kristin

• 
• Kurt Spellmeyer
• Professor of English
• This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Phone Number: (848) 932-7570
• Office: Murray Hall, Room 022, College Ave Campus
• Office Hours:

  TTh 2:30-3:30 and by appointment

• Primary Areas of Specialization: Writing Studies
• About:

  Professor Spellmeyer is the author of Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century (2003), The New Humanities Reader (with Richard E. Miller, 2002), and Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition (1992), as well as articles on the theory of composition, critical theory of composition, critical theory, and academic institutions. He is currently at work on a book, World without End: Saving the Humanities in an Age of Specialization, which examines the ways in which the modern system of professors has helped to reconstitute older—and undemocratic—forms of social privilege.

• Book(s):
  
  Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century
  
  Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition
  
  The New Humanities Reader, 3rd Edition
• Undergraduate Courses Taught:
  • Expository Writing
  • Expository Writing II
• Graduate Courses Taught:
  • Teaching Composition
• Other Publications:
  • "Opinion: Saving the Social Imagination: The Function of the Humanities at the Present Time" 
    College English 74.6, July 2012
  • "Review: A Massive Failure of Imagination" 
    College English 70.6, July 2008
  • "Commentary: Specialists With Spirit: New Age Religion, English Studies, and the 'Somatic Turn'" 
    Religion and the Arts 3.2, 1999
  • "Culture and Agency" 
    College Composition and Communication 48.2, May 1997
  • "After Theory: From Textuality to Attunement with the World"
    College English 58.8, 1996
  • "Travels to the Heart of the Forest: Dilettantes, Professionals, and Knowledge" 
    College English 56.7, 1994
  • "A Comment on 'Democracy, Pedagogy, and the Personal Essay'" 
    College English 55.1, 1993
  • "'Too Little Care': Language, Politics, and Embodiment in the Life-World"
    College English 55.3, 1993
  • "Kurt Spellmeyer Responds" 
    College English 52.3, 1990
• Education: PhD, University of WashingtonMA, University of WashingtonBA, University of Virginia