About Stephen Burt

I write books about poetry, essays on other people’s poems, books of my own poems, and shorter pieces about poems, poets, poetry, comics, science-fiction writers, political controversies, obscure pop groups, and the WNBA. My writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Believer (where you can read the essay that gave this blog its title), the Boston Review, and as part of the Songs from Scratch experiment at Minnesota Public Radio.

My published books are:  The Art of the Sonnet (with David Mikics, Harvard University Press, 2010) Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf, 2009), Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler (editor with Nick Halpern, University of Virginia Press, 2009), The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry (Columbia University Press, 2007), Parallel Play: Poems (Graywolf, 2006), Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (editor with Hannah Brooks-Motl, Columbia University Press, 2005), Randall Jarrell and His Age (Columbia University Press, 2002), and Popular Music: Poems (Center for Literary Publishing, 1999).

I am a Professor of English at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, I spent several years at Macalester College, first as an Assistant Professor, then as an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English. I received my Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2000, my A.B. from Harvard in 1994.