“Burt is one of the leading poet-critics of her own emerging generation, turning out an astonishing amount of terrific review-based criticism.” —Publishers Weekly

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor numerous published books, including critical books on poetry and four poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf Press, 2009) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The poems in her most recent collection, We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022), was described by Madeleine Wattenberg for The Georgia Review as “Oriented toward a queer futurity’s potential, these poems rarely land in certainty. Burt reminds us that the surface reflects to the observer just one story, one script, and when we dip below what initially appears, we meet numerous realms and ways of being as mysterious and lovely as the unknown that flourishes on the ocean floor.”

Her other works include Advice from the Lights: Poems (Graywolf, 2017); Don’t Read Poetry (Basic Books, 2019); The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard UP, 2016); Belmont (2013); The Art of the Sonnet (Harvard University Press, 2010); Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler (University of Virginia Press, 2009); The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry (Columbia University Press, 2007); Parallel Play: Poems (Graywolf, 2006); Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (University Press, 2005); Randall Jarrell and His Age (Columbia University Press, 2002); and Popular Music (Center for Literary Publishing, 1999).

Burt grew up around Washington, DC, and received an A.B. from Harvard in 1994 and a Ph.D. in English from Yale in 2000. She served as co-Poetry Editor for The Nation from 2017-2020. Currently, she is a professor of English at Harvard University.

The New York Times called Burt “one of the most influential poetry critics of her generation.” The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Believer, and the Boston Review.

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