John Keene | |
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 Keene in 2022 | |
| Born | 1965 (age 58–59) St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. |
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John R. Keene Jr. (born 1965) is an American writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His 2022 poetry collection, Punks: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry. [1]
John Keene was born and raised in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, and in Webster Groves, in St. Louis County. Raised Catholic, he attended parochial schools, and graduated from the Saint Louis Priory School. [2] [3] He has an A.B. from Harvard College, where he was a member of the Harvard Black Community and Student Theater (C.A.S.T.) and served as co-Circulation Manager and on the Art Board of the Harvard Advocate. He received an M.F.A. from New York University, where he was a New York Times Foundation Fellow. He was a longtime member of the Dark Room Collective, an organization that from 1988 to 1998 celebrated and gave greater visibility to emerging and established writers of color, and also is a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem.
Formerly associate professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern University, Illinois, United States, he now is Distinguished Professor of English, chairs the African American and African Studies department, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University-Newark. [4] He has taught at Brown and NYU, and at the Indiana University Writer's Conference. For several years he has served as an editorial board member for the African Poetry Book Fund, which aims to promote contemporary poetry by African poets through a range of projects, including its book series, contests, workshops, seminars, and library-development efforts.
His first novel, Annotations, was published by New Directions in 1995. Publishers Weekly wrote that "Annotations is a work that should not be ignored and is worthy of the highest recommendation. It is an experimental text that points a new direction for literary fiction in the 21st century." [5] A collection of poems entitled Seismosis, in conversation with artwork by Christopher Stackhouse, was published by 1913 Press in 2006. [6]
In May 2015, New Directions published Counternarratives, his collection of short fiction, including several novellas. [7] In its review Publishers Weekly described the book as "suspenseful, thought provoking, mystical, and haunting....Keene's confident writing doesn't aim for easy description or evaluation; it approaches (and defies) literature on its own terms." [8] In her May 2015 review of Counternarratives in Harper's Magazine, Christine Smallwood said of Keene and the collection, "Counternarratives is an extraordinary work of literature. Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer." [9] For this and earlier work, he received a 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. [10] In August 2016, Counternarratives was awarded an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. [11]
UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions released a British edition of Counternarratives in 2016. [12] Reviewer Kate Webb wrote in her TLS review of Counternarratives that "the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of [Keene's] remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own. His book achieves no less than an imaginative repositioning of the history of the Americas." [13] In March 2017 Fitzcarraldo was awarded the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses for Counternarratives, a unanimous decision by all six judges, who described Keene's collection as "a once in a generation achievement for short form fiction. Its subject matter, formal inventiveness, multitude of voices, and seriousness of purpose transform a series of thematically linked stories into a complete work of art." [14] [15]
GRIND, an art-poetry collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, was published in February 2016 by ITI Press. A chapbook of old and new poems, Playland, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in September 2016.
In 2014, Letters from a Seducer, his translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst's 1991 novel Cartas de um sedutor, was published by Nightboat Books and A Bolha Editora. [16] This translation was selected for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist. [17] He has published translations from French, Portuguese and Spanish, of work by writers including Alain Mabanckou, [18] Mateo Morrison, Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, Claudia Roquette-Pinto, and Jean Wyllys, among others.
He also has given talks and published essays on translation, including "Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness," one of a series of essays curated by poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky that appears on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog; the essay advocates for increased translation of poets of African descent, poets who consider themselves "black" (in Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands), and other poets of color across the globe. [19]
Keene also has engaged in public and durational conceptual events such as the "Emotional Outreach Project", under the rubric of the Field Research Study Group A, beginning in 2002. He has exhibited his work several times at This Red Door's short-term galleries, in Brooklyn [20] and Berlin in 2013, [21] and in January 2014 introduced his "Emotional Outreach Project 6.0: The Emotional Exercises," at TRD's space at Kunsthalle Galapagos in Brooklyn. [20]
Anne Patricia Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor.
Denis Hale Johnson was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is perhaps best known for his debut short story collection, Jesus' Son (1992). His most successful novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award for Fiction. Johnson was twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Altogether, Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in 2018.
John B. Balaban is an American poet and translator, an authority on Vietnamese literature.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
Melanie Rae Thon is an American fiction writer known for work that moves beyond and between genres, erasing the boundaries between them as it explores diversity, permeability, and interdependence from a multitude of human and more-than-human perspectives.
Richard Siken is an American poet, painter, and filmmaker. He is the author of the collection Crush, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 2004. His second book of poems, War of the Foxes, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015.
Daniel Alarcón is a Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.
Jay Hopler was an American poet.
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom is an American novelist.
Tupelo Press is an American not-for-profit literary press founded in 1999. It produced its first titles in 2001, publishing poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Originally located in Dorset, Vermont, the press has since moved to North Adams, Massachusetts.
Tyehimba Jess is an American poet. His book Olio received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
A. Van Jordan is an American poet. He is a professor at Stanford University and was previously a college professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan and distinguished visiting professor at Ithaca College. He previously served as the first Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor at the Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of four collections: Rise (2001), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005), Quantum Lyrics (2007), and The Cineaste (2013). Jordan's awards include a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Atsuro Riley is an American writer.
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Don Mee Choi is a Korean-American poet and translator.
Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses is an annual British literary prize founded by the author Neil Griffiths. It rewards fiction published by UK and Irish small presses, defined as those with fewer than five full-time employees. The prize money – initially raised by crowdfunding and latterly augmented by sponsorship – is divided between the publishing house and the author.
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