About

I’m a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, and I edit fiction and poetry for The Atlantic. I’m also in academic leadership, serving as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Academic Affairs for the College of Arts and Sciences at CWRU. I like to think about ways that we can promote the serious reading and writing at the core of the humanities.

My most recent book is The Singing Word: 168 Years of Poetry from The Atlantic, an anthology of poetry published in The Atlantic since 1857, beginning with “Paul Revere’s Ride.” I’ve written about poetry and globalization in Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham UP, 2019)–and about poetry and housing in The American House Poem, 1945-2021 (Oxford UP, 2023). My work has been supported by the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the South Carolina Arts Commission, the Teagle Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities, and the James Merrill House, where I was writer-in-residence.

I’ve written a book of poetry, Some Flowers (MadHat, 2022), and am pretty sure I’m working on another. My poems have appeared in The Atlantic, the Boston Review, the Hopkins Review, Literary Imagination, and the New York Review of Books. I have a lively interest in French literature and philosophy, and have translated Frédéric Neyrat’s Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism with Lindsay Turner.

Lindsay and I live in Shaker Heights, OH with our son Julian.

Here’s a video about my research, teaching, and editorial work:

Email.