ACADEMIC INTERESTS
My primary areas of teaching and research are poetry and poetics, creative writing (poetry,
fiction, creative nonfiction, formally innovative writing, creative writing
pedagogy, the intersection of creative and critical writing), and poetry of the
African diaspora (especially African American and Black British).
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TEACHING
The undergraduate courses that I have recently taught are Modern Poetry, Contemporary Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Statement Magazine,
Senior Seminar, Poetry Writing, and Creative Writing. The graduate courses that I
have recently taught are Poetry Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction, The African American Poetic Tradition,
Poetry as Difference, and Black British Writing.
In 2008-2009, I am teaching Creative Nonfiction (Eng-406), Poetry Writing (Eng-408
and Eng-508), Black British Literature and Culture 1948-2008 (Eng-560),
Creative Writing (Eng-207) and Contemporary Poetry (Eng-479).
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EDUCATION
Ph.D. English
- The University of Chicago
M.A. Creative Writing and English
- The University of Chicago
B.A. Creative Writing
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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Books and Edited Journal Issues:
What I Say: Innovative
Poetries by Black Artists in America, with Aldon Lynn Nielsen (University
of Alabama Press, 2009).
Poems by Anthony Joseph, Selected and Introduced by Lauri Ramey (Salt,
2008).
Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).
The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962-1975:
A Research Compendium, in consultation with Paul Breman
(Ashgate, 2008).
Every Goodbye Ain't Gone:
An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans, with Aldon
Lynn Nielsen
(University of Alabama Press, 2006).
Black British Writing,
with R. Victoria Arana (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Sea Change: Black British Writing
(Drexel University, Spring 2001).
Articles:
Chapters on Patience Agbabi, Anthony Joseph and SuAndi in Dictionary of
Literary Biography: Contemporary Black British Writers, ed. R. Victoria
Arana (Bruccoli, Clark, Layman, 2008).
Introduction,
The African Origins of UFOs, Anthony Joseph (Salt, 2007).
Creative Writing and Critical Theory chapter in
The Creative Writing Handbook, ed. Steven Earnshaw (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
"Situating a Black British Poetic Avant-Garde" in
"Black" British Aesthetics
Today, ed. R. Victoria Arana (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).
"Freedom in Form: Patience Agbabi.”
Sable Litmag (Spring 2007).
Entries on Calvin C. Hernton, Ray Durem, Ellease Southerland/Ebele Oseye and Lenard D. Moore in
Encyclopedia of African American Literature,
ed. David Macey and Hans Ostrom (Greenwood, 2005).
Entries on Michael Palmer and the African American Slave Songs in
Encyclopedia of American Poetry,
ed. Jeffrey Gray (Greenwood, 2005).
"An Introduction: Roi Kwabena's Whether or Not"
(Postcolonial Website,
ed. George P. Landow, 2005).
“A Complicated Century in Poetry.”
Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 4:2/3 (New York University, 2002).
“The Theology of the Lyric Tradition in African American Spirituals.”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70:2 (Oxford University Press, June 2002).
"Michael Palmer's The Lion Bridge.”
Valparaiso Poetry Review, Vol. III, No. 2, (Spring/Summer 2002).
“Building a History: The African American Poetry Archive.”
Facture 2 (Spring 2001), 182-198.
"Poetry:
“Blended Space: Absence with Drums” (poem).
Poetrybay (Summer 2004).
“Bedtime Story” and “Blended Space: Riddles with Bondage” (poems).
nthposition (June 2004).
“Blended Space: Seascape With Buildings”
(poem).
nycBigCityLit (Spring 2003).
“Refrigerator Piece”
(poem). Poetrybay (Fall 2001).
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M.Phil/Ph.D. STUDENTS
Wayne Thomas, PhD in Creative and Critical Writing, Cardiff University (2007). Dissertation: The Welsh-American Nexus in Best Intentions. Thomas’s dissertation consists of a collection of short stories (Best Intentions) and a long essay (‘Welsh Experience, American Exemplar’) wherein he discusses his fiction in the light of Welsh writing in English that has shown considerable engagement with America. Central to Thomas’s discussion is the view that his creative work has been enriched by American example, most especially as it applies to the writings of Raymond Carver. Thomas is currently at work on a second collection of stories, provisionally titled Besides Drinking and a Little Carpentry? He is also at work on a collection of critical pieces, provisionally titled Things American: Essays on Literature, wherein he discusses the writings of, amongst others, Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Jane Kenyon.
Jasper Cross, Ph.D. in Creative and Critical Writing, Cardiff University
(2006). Dissertation: The Man of Instructions, accompanied by a
critical commentary, is a coming-of-age novel that shifts back and forth through
time as the narrator seeks his identity in the potential selves that are the
characters who populate his writing, his dream life and his everyday life. Cross
earned an MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing with Distinction
at Cardiff University, and is currently completing an MA in English literature at California
State University, Los Angeles, where he won the 2005
Dean's Prize in Fiction for
an excerpt from his dissertation.
Lisa Mansell, Ph.D. in Creative and Critical Writing, Cardiff University
(2007). Dissertation: The Form of the Fix:Transatlantic Sonority in the Minority. An interrogation of oral and sonic traditions in minority Anglophone literatures, especially Anglo-Welsh and African-American literatures. A shared point of identification manifests through collective positions of 'sonic' tradition (a more linguistically acrobatic and/or musical bias than more general notions of 'oral tradition'). Amid minorities, figures of canon also enter the dialogue in the bardic spectre of Shakespeare (Chapter 1) and the deeply perma-critical pulse of Aristotle (Chapter 4). These canonical figures demonstrate a minority slant on the dominant world that beholds notions of inheritance, role-model, heritage, and identity. Challenging these representations of textual dominance shows that minority texts are not frozen into a position of un-canon, but have multiple points of identification, some of which belong to the canon, the dominant: ancestors that reside outside their local setting of textual production. This shows that identity is always plural, fragmented; foreign and familiar.
The dissertation maintains a formally and linguistically innovative mode throughout, composed ambitiously in the form of critical-creative writing that I call "critical-lyric". This blended voice stylistically and metaphorically complements the multiple points of identification that form an interrogation of oral and sonic traditions in minority Anglophone literatures, to show identity's flexibility, fallacy, fix, and fortitude.
Vanessa Richards, M.Phil in Creative Writing, Cardiff University (2005).
Dissertation: "Hom(e)age," a collection of poetry, prose, photographic images and
videos, accompanied by a critical commentary. Two themes are explored. One is
the notion of home and being at home in one's life. Two is coming of age, as in
moving into and out of the feminine phase of fertility. Richards is currently
Artist-in-Residence at Public Dreams Society in Vancouver, Canada, where she is
developing an intercultural and interdisciplinary carnival.
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SELECTED AWARDS AND ACTIVITIES
Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation Huntington Library Research
Fellowship, 2006-07.
Katherine Carter Fund Grants, Department of English, California State
University, Los Angeles, 2008, 2007, 2006.
Joseph A. Bailey II, MD Fellowship in the African American Experience, 2005.
Cambridge Seminar Fellowship, 2005.
British Council Fellowship, 2004.
Director of the
British Council
Poets-in-Residence Program at California State University, Los Angeles,
2004-present.
Director of the
Jean Burden Poetry
Series at California State University, Los Angeles, 2004-present.
Founding Curator of The African American Poetry Archive, Hampton University.
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