Thom Donovan

Part-time Assistant Professor

Thom Donovan is a poet, editor, curator, and educator currently living in Brooklyn, NY. His poems and essays have appeared widely in print and online journals including Afterall, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket 2, Modern Painters, Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, Shifter, Bomb, PAJ, Rethinking Marxism, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Performa, SF MoMA, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and his first trade edition book, THE HOLE, appeared with Displaced Press in 2012. His second book of poems, WITHDRAWN, is forthcoming with Compline Books in 2015. He is also the author of nine chapbooks, including collaborations with CA Conrad (ARTHUR ECHO) and Kyle Schlesinger (MANTLE). He is the co-editor and publisher of ON CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE, an online journal and print monograph series for critical writings about one’s contemporaries. From 2010-2012 he edited the column “5 Questions for Contemporary Practice” at Art21 blog. Recently he edited SUPPLE SCIENCE: A ROBERT KOCIK PRIMER (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary Practice Monograph Series, fall 2013) and TO LOOK AT THE SEA IS TO BECOME WHAT ONE IS: AN ETEL ADNAN READER (with Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, forthcoming summer 2014). Since 2006 he has edited the weblog, WILD HORSES OF FIRE. He has also been a guest blogger for Performa, Poetry Foundation, Jacket 2, The Academy of America Poets, The Capilano Review, and the Ford Foundation. From 2006-2008 he curated PEACE ON A, an event series for emergent writing and art, and from 2008-2010 curated the SEGUE SERIES. Currently he curates THE MULTIFARIOUS ARRAY, with Dorothea Lasky. With Sreshta Rit Premnath/Shifter he organized the PROJECT FOR AN ARCHIVE OF THE FUTURE ANTERIOR. In 2003 he organized a symposium at the University of Buffalo based on Louis Zukofsky’s Bottom: on Shakespeare, which included presentations and readings by poets, scholars, and students. He teaches courses in poetics and writing at School of Visual Arts, Parsons, and Pratt Institute and holds a Ph.D. in English from SUNY-Buffalo and a BA from Oberlin College. He has also been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Bard College, New York University, Baruch College, and New Jersey Institute of Technology. From 2011-2013 he served as Archive Manager for the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation and from 2006-2011 he archived the audio holdings of the Unterberg Poetry Center at 92Y. Currently he is a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.