Linda Voris is an associate professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington DC. Her teaching and research interests include twentieth-century American and British literature, the intellectual history of modernism and its relation to the visual arts, as well as contemporary lyrical and experimental poetry. She completed her PhD in English at the University of California at Berkeley, and taught at the New College Poetics Program in San Francisco and at Boston University before joining American University.
Her book, The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. Recent articles on Stein appeared in the collection Primary Stein (2015), and in the journals Studies in American Fiction and Modernism/modernity among others. She also conducted a theater workshop at the American Literature Association Conference that experimented with ways one might stage Stein’s first landscape play, “Lend A Hand Or Four Religions.” In 2012 she was invited to give a featured lecture on Stein’s experimental writing and the visual arts at the Smithsonian Institution, to coincide with the exhibition “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories,” at the National Portrait Gallery.
Voris has presented her work on the contemporary poets Lyn Hejinian and Tracie Morris in conference papers. Her article on the poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was published in the collection American Women Poets in the 21st Century. Her poetry chapbook, AntiGraphi, won the 2003 Providence Athenaeum award, and her poems have appeared in Volt, Germ, and online at New Media Poets. In addition to her own poetry, she has published translations of poems by Gabriela Mistral.
Voris is invested in promoting the role of poetry in the public sphere, and often organizes poetry related public readings and community events at American University. In recent years these events have included a marathon reading of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, in which more than 50 members of the AU and DC communities read sections of the poem; a marathon reading of poems by Frank O’Hara; a community writing project titled “The Exchange,” in which community members wrote short pieces (only 7 sentences) using a word revealed each day on campus for 7 days; and an open conversation involving poets, critics, and students on the various translations of Beowulf. She is currently the organizer of a working group on reading experimental poetry through the AU Humanities Lab.
Find me on Twitter @linda_voris