Linda Gregerson

LINDA GREGERSON is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015). Among her earlier books, Magnetic North (2007) was a finalist for the National Book Award; Waterborne (2002) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep was a finalist for both the Lenore Marshall Award and The Poets Prize. Gregerson has also received fellowships and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Modern Poetry Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Mellon, Rockerfeller, and Bogliasco Foundations. Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan and is also a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Linda Gregerson on the Workshop

Our aim in workshop is at once very simple and very complex: we make it our business to become an adaptable and rigorous critical readership for one another's work-in-progress. We use the workshop as an occasion to broaden formal and thematic range, to refine editorial skills, to share questions, enthusiasms, and generous skepticism. Our primary focus is on the current work submitted by members of the class, but we also read and discuss selected work by other poets, generally contemporaries in early or mid-career. 

In addition to submitting and revising poems for workshop discussion, members of the class also write biweekly prompt poems and take turns launching (in pairs) our discussion of published writing. In the thesis workshop, our special focus is on the structure and sequencing of the book-length manuscript.

Primary Interests

Creative writing; contemporary American poetry; literature and culture of the English Renaissance; historical subject formation; the politics of Reformation and early modern nationalism; Petrarchan lyric; Elizabethan and Stuart drama.

Secondary Interests

History and theory of performance