Rae Armantrout

Appointed for poetry, Rae Armantrout has been teaching in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, for over twenty-five years; currently, she is a Professor of Writing, specializing in poetry and poetics, and was the long-time Director of the New Writers’ Series.  Since the publication of her first two books of avant-garde poetry by small presses in San Francisco–Extremities (The Figures, 1978) and The Invention of Hunger (Tuumba, 1979)–Ms. Armantrout has gone on to publish nine more books of poety, including Couverture (Paris: Les Cahiers de Royaumont, 1991) and Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001; German ed., Lux Books, forthcoming), Up to Speed (2004), and Next Life (2007), all published by Wesleyan UP.  Noted for their wit, incisiveness, and accessibility, her poems have also been published in American Poet, Partisan Review, Poetry, the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and other notable journals, and have been anthologized many times, in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, American Women Poets of the 21st Century, and six times in the annual Best American Poetry (1988, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007, and 2008), among other collections.

In 1989 and 2002, she received a Fellowship in Poetry from the California Arts Council, and she has been an invited reader at the 5th International Literary Festical in Berlin, Germany (2005) and the Sound Eye Literary Festival in Cork, Ireland (2007). In 2007, she was honored with the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award in Poetry; Poetry Magazine awarded her its Frederick Bock prize in 2008.

The poems Ms. Armantrout completed during her Fellowship term are included in her latest publication, Versed, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.