Is the Poet the New Public Intellectual? Today’s Poet-Critics on Criticism and Critique

Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard and the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, most recently The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Advice from the Lights: Poems (Graywolf, 2017). Her writings on poetry, comic books, and other topics appear semi-regularly in the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, Rain Taxi, the Yale Review, and other venues in the UK, US and New Zealand.

Gregory Pardlo‘s collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, was released by Knopf in April.

Tess Taylor’s first book, The Forage House, was called “stunning” by The San Francisco Chronicle. Her second book, Work & Days, was called “our moment’s Georgic” by critic Stephanie Burt and was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by The New York Times. Taylor’s poetry and nonfiction appear widely. She currently chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, and is on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered. She was a Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was most recently Anne Spencer Writer in Residence at Randolph College.

Craig Morgan Teicher‘s latest poetry collection, The Trembling Answers, won the 2018 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His first collection of essays, We Begin In Gladness: How Poets Progress, will be published by Graywolf in November.