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June 2026
Next spring, Cornell University Press will publish my new book, Muriel Rukeyser's "The Middle of the Air": A Critical Edition. It makes available for the first time Muriel Rukeyser's lost antifascist play from 1945. An experiment in modernist leftist theater, The Middle of the Air combines various forms and influences--verse-play, songs, parlor drama, political thriller, epic theater (à la Brecht), and Living Newspapers (a documentarian workers' theater tradition)--to imagine the start of a fascist revolution in the United States. The play is based on a reimagining of two historical events. Most of action provides a counterhistory about the public controversy surrounding Anne Morrow Lindbergh's fascist-sympathizing pamphlet The Wave of the Future (1940) and her support of her husband Charles Lindbergh's role as the fascist, antisemitic, and racist public face of the America First Committee. The mentor for Laramie, the character based on Charles Lindbergh, is an aspiring fascist business tycoon named King, whom Rukeyser modeled on Generoso Pope, an Italian American publishing magnate who supported Benito Mussolini and was her father's one-time business partner. Long before Philip Roth imagined in The Plot Against America an alternate universe where America First established a nativist neofascist regime, Rukeyser undertook a similar speculative venture.    

My recovery edition of The Middle of the Air includes an extended critical introduction, apparatuses and short essays about Rukeyser's composition and revision of the play over a decade, a scene she eliminated, a variant of another scene, and her lost short story "The Lights of Summer" (1950), about the only production of her play. 

Available in May 2027. Stay tuned for details.

May 2026
Out now from Cambridge University Press, the new collection Allen Ginsberg in Context, edited by Erik Mortenson, includes an essay by me about the month the Beat poet spent in Cuba in 1965. What transpired during this relatively short visit sparked the evolution of Ginsberg's thinking about activism and poetry, particularly in relation to the fraught nature of freedom of expression and sexual liberation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Through a largely biographical lens, my essay and all the others in the volume provide a critical account of Ginsberg's life and poetry--a poet's life as read through his work and the historical moments that he lived through and that he transformed.

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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.