John Keene

Instructor

John Keene is the author, co-author, co-editor, and translator of a handful of books including the forthcoming Love Is a Dangerous Word: The Selected Poems of Essex Hemphill, co-edited with Robert F. Reid-Pharr; Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas (2015), which received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, and Punks: New & Selected Poems (2021), which received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He has translated poetry and fiction by an array of authors, including Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s Letters from a Seducer, which appeared in 2014 and will be republished by Pushkin Press in 2025. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow and member of the African Poetry Book Fund editorial board, he is Distinguished Professor and has served as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.