news
July 2025
A new feature celebrating the publication of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's long poem The Complete Drafts (Coffee House Press, 2025) has been published on Norman Finkelstein's blog, Restless Messengers: Poetry in Review. My short essay on "Drafts 114: Exergue and Volta" appears alongside contributions by Megan Jewell, Adeena Karasick, Julia Bloch, Joseph Donahue, Patrick Pritchett, Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., and Divya Victor. Please check out this great symposium!
For other takes on Rachel's work, also check out the great volume Thinking with the Poem: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Rachel Blau DuPlessis (University of New Mexico Press, 2024), edited by Andrew Mossin, which was released right before the new year.
December 2024
The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose has been selected as co-winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship, a major recognition by the leading literary studies organization. See the complete list of MLA prize winners and access a link to the citation for our book's prize.
press
ABOUT MY CO-EDITED ANTHOLOGY
THE MURIEL RUKEYSER ERA
Today at UAlbany feature by Bethany Bump
A notice about The Muriel Rukeyser Era, my research on Rukeyser, and related upcoming community and public engagement events
select past events (recordings & other traces)
[Links for online events and for recordings
are supplied when available.]
About Muriel Rukeyser &/or My Co-EDITED Anthology The Muriel Rukeyser ERA
"Poet and Social Critic Muriel Rukeyser as a Prose Writer"
Made at the Library, a Webinar Series
The Library of Congress and the Center for Literacy, Literature, and Engagement
A special webinar on The Muriel Rukeyser Era for Poetry Month 2024, hosted by Barbara Bair (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress)
Thursday, April 25, 2024
For Poetry Month, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein and I were guests on a special episode of the Library of Congress’s webinar series Made at the Library, hosted by Barbara Bair, from the Library of Congress’ Manuscript Division. Many of the previously unpublished contents from The Muriel Rukeyser Era, our co-edited recovery of poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser’s prose, are archived at the Library of Congress. These items include important pieces we discussed during the episode, while sharing images of archival documents: the lecture series “The Usable Truth” (1940); “So Easy to See” (1946), Rukeyser’s introduction to an unrealized photographic essay collaboration with Berenice Abbott; the scripts for two of the four produced and broadcast episodes from Rukeyser’s radio series on poetry and music, Sunday at Nine (1949); and Rukeyser’s suppressed feminist essay “Many Keys” (1957), on women’s poetry and poetics. A video of this live-streamed event is now archived on the Library of Congress website.
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"Muriel Rukeyser's Vietnam-Era Poetry and Activism"
A Community Talk for Poetry Month
Sponsored by the Bethlehem Public Library
451 Delaware Avenue
Delmar, NY
Monday, April 15, 2024
For Poetry Month, I gave a talk for the local Capital District community about a chapter in Muriel Rukeyser’s life that is rarely discussed by scholars–her antiwar activism and related poetry projects during the early 1970s. The focus of my talk was on how her activist work with the grassroots organizations Project Nuremberg Obligation and RESIST extends her antifascist ethical and political commitment to social justice and human rights from the 1930s to the Vietnam War era. Key essays collected in The Muriel Rukeyser Era, as well as poems, translation projects, and other still-unpublished archival materials related to her activism, were discussed. The evening concluded with a great group reading of select sections of Rukeyser’s long poem Breaking Open (1973).
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“The Muriel Rukeyser Era: On Recovering a Mid-century Poet-Activist and Her Antifascist, Queer, Feminist Legacy”
12th Annual Capital District Feminist Studies Consortium Conference on International Women’s Day
The University at Albany, SUNY
Albany, NY
Friday, March 8, 2024
I was part of a panel titled History, Art, and Activism for an all-day regional consortium for International Women’s Day, organized and hosted by the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department of the University at Albany, SUNY. I spoke about the importance of researching the archives of committed queer feminist writers, with a focus on my work for my co-edited recovery edition of poet Muriel Rukeyser’s uncollected and previously unpublished prose.
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"The Rukeyser Era: A Discussion with Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein":
An Interview by Jeffrey Lependorf (The Flow Chart Foundation)
Online Book Launch Event for The Muriel Rukeyser Era
Hosted by The Flow Chart Foundation
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Watch a recording of our interview and readings of excerpts from the book.
My co-editor Rowena Kennedy-Epstein and I had a conversation with Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation, about our new book, The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose, which brings together for the first time previously uncollected and unpublished prose by the formidable anti-fascist, feminist, Jewish, and queer poet, activist, and public intellectual. We also read brief selections from the book.
For other upcoming Flow Chart events, click here.
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1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast: Episode 142 on The Muriel Rukeyser Era Released November 27, 2023 To listen to the podcast episode on Soundcloud, click here.
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein and I were invited by Jonathan L. Hall from Cornell University Press to discuss the feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, and queer legacies of poet-activist Muriel Rukeyser and the making of the The Muriel Rukeyser Era, a new recovery edition of her unpublished and uncollected short-form prose.
To subscribe to 1869 or to listen to other episodes, click here.
other past events
"How to Be Anti-fascist: Muriel Rukeyser and The Life of Poetry" Podcast episode for Interchange (2021)
Listen to me in conversation with Doug Storm for a wonderfully produced episode about how Muriel Rukeyser's postwar poetics classic The Life of Poetry (1949) builds a bridge between today's antifascist activism and aesthetics and those of the Popular and Cultural Fronts in the 1930s and early 1940s.
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"Writing in Crisis: Political Un/Consciousness and Muriel Rukeyser's Anti-fascist Career" Paper for the webinar Revisiting Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies in Times Like These (February 20, 2021)
Watch a YouTube video of a session of a public webinar devoted to celebrating Muriel Rukeyser's collection, Elegies (1940-1949). Just a little over a month after the attempted neo-fascist MAGA coup on January 6th, 2021, I speak about reading Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies as establishing a foundation for understanding her antiwar activism and poetics. Rukeyser later drew on this precedent during Vietnam, particularly during her participation in, and following her arrest at, a high-profile protest in the US Capitol Building in 1972. She explicitly described her work with the Nuremberg Obligation, the antiwar movement that co-organized this direct action, as a continuation of her anti-fascist commitments from a quarter-century earlier.
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"The Unseen Document: Talks on Berenice Abbott and Muriel Rukeyser" Public talk at the Poetry Project, New York City (March 2020)
Days before the COVID-19 lockdowns began, Sarah M. Miller and I gave talks at the Poetry Project about our separate work on the queer documentarian poetics of poet-activist Muriel Rukeyser and her former collaborator and photographer Berenice Abbott. The event was organized and moderated by writer Ariel Goldberg. Unfortunately, there is no recording of what turned out to be a terrific event.
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"Emerson and 'The Common'" Podcast episode for Against the Grain (2013, rebroadcast 2021)
Following the appearance of my essay "Reading Emerson, in Other Times: On a Politics of Solitude and an Ethics of Risk" in the collection The Other Emerson (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), I was invited by C.S. Soong to appear on the radio series and podcast Against the Grain, broadcast on KPFA (San Francisco) and WBAI (New York City). Our conversation explored how the Transcendentalist thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson challenges prevailing notions about the solitariness and supposedly apolitical nature of reading.
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"Aversive Prose: A Panel Presentation" The Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (September 15, 2016)
Josephine Park and I invited several prominent poets--Charles Bernstein, Julia Bloch, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Evie Shockley--to appear on a special public roundtable about nonacademic critical prose. The event was hosted by Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and was captured on video. Charles suggested the title, to convey not only the aversion of such writing practices to alienating academicism but also its affiliation with the creative relationship to poetry and poetics (a verse). And, of course, another Charles (Olson) is probably buried in there, too, as a contestation or invocation of his epoch-defining idea of projective verse.
OPENING THE FIELD 