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Poets as Public Scholars is a multimedia project that interrogates how poet-scholars use digital platforms to expand access and visibility for underrepresented voices, but also to critique the commodification, extraction, and erasure practices embedded in neoliberal literary circulation. Framed by two core questions—how poets teach public scholarship through networked media, and how to support underrepresented poets without reinforcing market-driven erasure—the collection offers videos for student and public engagement, essays for scholarly audiences, and discussion questions for classroom use.

Structured around seven video dialogues and seven critical essays, the book features contributions from poet-scholars including Camea Davis, A.D. Carson, Tyrone Williams, Patrick Milian, Stevi Costa, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Woogee Bae. Each chapter examines the material and affective economies that shape poetic production and reception, while proposing alternative, community-rooted infrastructures for literary and cultural labor. Designed for layered audiences, the video interviews model public-facing discourse, while the companion essays situate the work within critical conversations in literature, cultural theory, and media studies. With included discussion questions by Dr. Molly Ubbesen (University of Minnesota Rochester) and open access availability, Poets as Public Scholars functions as both a teaching tool and a theoretical intervention for scholars and educators seeking to integrate anti-racist, anti-capitalist approaches to literary and digital humanities pedagogy.

An exploration of how the Iranian people have renewed their longtime struggle for freedom

The Woman, Life, Freedom uprising is only the latest manifestation of a century-long struggle for liberation in Iran. This ongoing movement for justice has encompassed two revolutions against domestic dictatorship and foreign imperialism, as well as a series of uprisings since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which was followed by a new era of repression. Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle offers an intersectional analysis of how progressive and radical movement builders have reenvisioned liberation in the post-’79 era, despite new forms of oppression under the Islamic Republic and from US and other foreign imperial powers. Bringing together a diverse array of sources, including oral histories with Iranian labor, student, and gender justice organizers, as well as resistance literature and art, Alborz Ghandehari challenges narratives that treat working-class, feminist, queer, and oppressed ethnic minorities’ movements as separate from one another. Post/Revolutionary Conditions demonstrates how such potent reimaginings of collective liberation and a radically democratic future have been shaped by multiple generations of protest and kindred struggles globally.

Tracing the Origins of Digital Poetry Before the Web Revolution

For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology to foster a new aesthetic. Focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C. T. Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the foundations of today’s most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual, and interlinked productions of the genre’s prehistoric period.

Since 1959, computers have been used to produce several types of poetic output, including randomly generated writings, graphical works (static, animated, and video formats), and hypertext and hypermedia. Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware, programming, and software have been used to compose a range of new digital poetic forms. Several dozen historical examples, drawn from all of the predominant approaches to digital poetry, are discussed, highlighting the transformational and multi-faceted aspects of poetic composition now available to authors. This account includes many works, in English and other languages, which have never before been presented in an English-language publication.

In exploring pioneering works of digital poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse. As a history of early digital poetry and a record of an era that has passed, this study aspires both to influence poets working today and to highlight what the future of digital poetry may hold.

 

Melissa Range’s Printer’s Fist, awarded the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection that tells the story of a political movement—its strides and setbacks, its unity and fractures—with a particular emphasis on print culture. Drawing upon more than a decade’s worth of archival research into nineteenth-century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and more, Range highlights the expansiveness of the movement by focusing not on one, but a chorus of abolitionist voices. Her investment in celebrating Black and women’s histories, in particular, offers an inclusive account of American history, informed not only by thorough research but through a formal, poetic engagement with the past. In exploring how enslaved people’s self-emancipation was a form of resistance that preceded, operated alongside, and intertwined with organized networks of antislavery activists, Printer’s Fist will help facilitate discussions surrounding race, gender, and activism that are grounded in historical fact and emotional truth.

Melissa Range’s Printer’s Fist, awarded the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection that tells the story of a political movement—its strides and setbacks, its unity and fractures—with a particular emphasis on print culture. Drawing upon more than a decade’s worth of archival research into nineteenth-century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and more, Range highlights the expansiveness of the movement by focusing not on one, but a chorus of abolitionist voices. Her investment in celebrating Black and women’s histories, in particular, offers an inclusive account of American history, informed not only by thorough research but through a formal, poetic engagement with the past. In exploring how enslaved people’s self-emancipation was a form of resistance that preceded, operated alongside, and intertwined with organized networks of antislavery activists, Printer’s Fist will help facilitate discussions surrounding race, gender, and activism that are grounded in historical fact and emotional truth.

Cornelius Eady turns the inaugural poem into an instrument of reckoning.

First delivered to mark the historic inauguration of New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 1, 2026, the title poem is not ceremony—it is summons. “You have to imagine it,” Eady insists, and from that insistence rises a chorus: those called too dark, too queer, too poor, too loud; those renamed invisible; those told “not now.” What if joy could wear down the rock of no? What if imagination were not escape, but evidence?

Moving from Robert Frost squinting into winter glare, to Elizabeth Alexander straightening her back before history, to Aretha Franklin beneath her church-crown hat, Eady braids civic pageantry with private memory. He summons the Colored Conventions of 1830, the 911 call that ricocheted through racial panic, the mock rifles on a Brooklyn rooftop, the “knife in sheep’s clothes.” Each poem widens the frame. Each poem refuses to look away.

Fiedorczuk was inspired by her readings of the original Hebrew Psalms, as well as by the process of learning to sing. In her poems she captures the heartache and joy of the Biblical Psalms, but in the context of modern life. She addresses climate change, loss of biodiversity, the upheavals of migration, and, in her most recent poems, the return of war to Europe: “Even when bombs are falling you ought to write / perhaps even especially when people lost / in the woods are saying cold, she is so cold.”

Fiedorczuk writes of the natural world, the built environment, motherhood, brotherhood, and of vast and tiny passages of time. And as she does, she discovers a new voice, singing to soothe and inspire.

 

whose
flower made from a clod of pain will enfold
the milky way with its claws
of time, its pelt of stars?
—Excerpt from “Psalm XVII”

This volume offers the most wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of Puerto Rican poetry available in English. It includes the work of sixty-four poets, as well as many previously inaccessible selections from Puerto Rico's tradition of popular verse forms—coplas, décimas, bombas—produced by anonymous writers. All are presented in English, contextualized and individually introduced by Roberto Márquez, a distinguished translator and literary scholar.

Book I, “Before Columbus and After, 1400–1820,” focuses on the foundational origins of Puerto Rican poetry and the clash of competing visions embodied in the rich and heterogeneous corpus of anonymous popular verse forms. Book II, “The Creole Matrix: Notions of Nation, 1821–1950s,” concentrates on the period in which a distinctively Puerto Rican consciousness emerged and the island's subsequent experience as a U. S. colony in the decades after the Spanish-Cuban-American War up to formal establishment of Commonwealth status. Books III and IV are devoted, respectively, to the era of insular “Critique, Revolt, and Renewal” in the mid-twentieth century, and to the “New Creoles, New Definitions” that developed in the late twentieth century, including the distinct and parallel growth of Puerto Rican poetry in the mainland United States.

In addition to a general introduction and concise biographical profiles of each poet, Márquez provides a detailed “Chronology” of the history of the island that has shaped the poets and informed their work. The resulting volume is a major contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Puerto Rican literature and the heterogeneous society in which it has been produced.