Faculty: Rae Armantrout
Photo: Nancy Richards Wolfing
Rae Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California and grew up in San Diego. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Denis Levertov and a received a master's degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University.
Armantrout was at the center of the first generation of Language Poets, the group in the US most often credited with introducing poetry to postmodernity.
Rae Armantrout has published eleven books of poetry, including:
Versed (Wesleyan, 2009), was a finalist for the National Book Award and is a finalist for the upcoming National Book Critics Circle Award
Next Life, (Wesleyan, 2007), selected by the New York Times as one of the most notable books of 2007
Collected Prose (Singing Horse, 2007)
Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Poetry
Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2001), also a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award
The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001)
Made To Seem (1995)
The Invention of Hunger (1979)
Her poems have been included in anthologies, including:
American Hybrid (Norton, 2009)
Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1993)
American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002)
The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006)
The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2008.
Armantrout received an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
She has been a Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego for over two decades and where she has directed the New Writing Series at UCSD since 1989.
"The literature of the anti-lyric, those poems that at first glance appear contained and perhaps even simple, but which upon the slightest examination rapidly provoke a sort of vertigo effect as element after element begins to spin wildly toward more radical...possibilities."
- Ron Silliman, from the preface of Veil.
Writing in Poetry magazine, Ange Mlinko has said, “I would trade the bulk of contemporary anecdotal free verse for more incisive, chilling poetry like Armantrout’s."