RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

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COURSES

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 and Culture 1948-the Present.

In 2008-2009, I am teaching Creative Nonfiction (Eng-406), Poetry Writing (BA Eng-408 and MA Eng-508),  Black British Literature and Culture 1948-Present (MA Eng-560), Creative Writing (Eng-207) and Contemporary Poetry (Eng-479).

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EDUCATION

• The University of Chicago
  

M.A. Creative Writing and English

• The University of Chicago
  

B.A. Creative Writing

• Oberlin College
  

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books and Edited Journal Issues:

Black British Writing with R.Victoria Arana, Revised paperback edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

What I Say: Innovative Poetries by Black Artists in America with Aldon Lynn Nielsen (University of Alabama Press, 2009)

Testing the Thunderstone: Selected Poems by Anthony Joseph, Edited and Introduction by Lauri Ramey (Salt, 2009)

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) 

Vines 7 (Ishmael Reed Publications, Spring 2002) 

Writing in Education 23: Writing and Community (National Association of Writers in Education, Summer 2001)

Vines 3 (Ishmael Reed Publications, Winter 1999)

Book Chapters and Articles:

“Contemporary Black British Poetry as a Diasporic Avant-Garde.” Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, Ed. Carrie Noland and Barrett Watten (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

“Patience Agbabi and SuAndi.” Women: A Cultural Review (Routledge, 2009)

“The Influence of the Spirituals on Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Jazz and the Black Poet: Essays on Black Poetry and the Influence of Black Popular Music, Ed. Gordon Thompson (University of Illinois Press, 2009)

“Insiders and Outsiders in ‘Black Watch.’” Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge, 2008)

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 discusses my short stories in the light of modern and contemporary Welsh writing in English. Central to my discussion is the view that my work has been enriched by both Welsh and American writers, most notably Gwyn Thomas and Raymond Carver. I am currently working on a collection of personal essays called Besides Drinking and a Little Carpentry? I am an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Open University in Wales.

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 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. He is currently teaching in the Department of English at California State University, Los Angeles.

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. I am an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University of Staffordshire.

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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FELLOWSHIPS, HONORS AND AWARDS

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CAMPUS AND PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

Director, Presidentially Chartered Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics at California State University, Los Angeles, 2004-present

Director, British Council Poets-in-Residence Program at California State University, Los Angeles, 2004-present 

Director, Jean Burden Poetry Series and Visiting Poets Series at California State University, Los Angeles, 2004-present

Founding Curator of The African American Poetry Archive, Hampton University

Faculty Advisor, Statement Magazine, 2004-2007 and co-editor with Mary Bush for 60th Anniversary Special Edition, 2010

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