José Felipe Alvergue, Ph.D. M.F.A.

I am a graduate of both the Cal Arts Writing (MFA) and Buffalo Poetics (PhD) programs. My interdisciplinary work engages decoloniality and embodiment through the lenses of aesthetics and aesthetic theory, performance study, poetry and poetics, political histories of the Americas, and political theory. I am the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (2015) and precis (2017), and my third book scenery (2020) won Fordham University Press's Poets Out Loud Editor's Prize. My book of sonnet essays en el norte/soy del sur is forthcoming with Omnidawn, and my work of auto-theory, purplish: poetry anger publics is forthcoming with the University of Iowa Press. I am a member of the Salvadoran diaspora, and my inquiries into national identity in the 21st-century––as one of human geography, migration, care, and survival––shapes the way I often approach teaching. I believe that we can’t unlock the empathy hidden behind words if we don’t understand what is at stake in the risk writers and artists take when they decide to transform the matter which makes up the world around them into the story words communicate.