Joan Retallack

Poet, critic, biographer, and multidisciplinary scholar Joan Retallack grew up in New York City and Charleston, South Carolina. She earned a BA from the University of Illinois, Urbana and an MA from Georgetown University. She has authored many books, including Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d (2010), Memnoir (2004), A F T E R R I M A G E S (1995), Icarus FFFFFalling (1994), and Circumstantial Evidence (1985). Her honors include an American Award in Belles-Lettres, a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the Lannan Foundation for poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Retallack’s experimental poetics and poetry emphasize alterity and imagination, and increasingly examine what she described in a Jacket essay as “the languages of description.” A recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, Retallack’s Errata 5uite (1993) was selected by renowned poet Robert Creeley to receive the Columbia Book Award. Hank Lazer of RIF/T review praised Errata 5uite, calling it “philosophical and playful, intelligent and error-prone.”

As the author of numerous critical studies, including The Poethical Wager (2003), Retallack has also published a volume on Gertrude Stein and a book of conversations with American composer and poet John Cage and written essays for Poetics Journal, Parnassus, and the Washington Review of the Arts.

Retallack is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor Emerita of Humanities at Bard College, where she directed the Language & Thinking program for 10 years. She is working with others to develop an Arabic Language & Thinking Program at Al-Quds University, the Palestinian university in Jerusalem.