Bradley J. Fest is associate professor of English at Hartwick College, where he has taught courses in twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States literature and culture, creative writing, poetry and poetics, and digital studies since 2017. He is the author of a number of essays on contemporary literature and culture and has published three volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015; review here), The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017; read it here and here), and 2013–2017: Sonnets (LJMcD Communications, 2024; read it here), the first volume in his ongoing American sonnet sequence, along with a recent long poem, “Postrock,” in Always Crashing.

His critical and scholarly writing on contemporary literature and culture has appeared in boundary 2, The b2o Review (also here), CounterText, Critical Quarterly, Critique, First Person Scholar, Genre, Studies in the Novel, and Wide Screen; essays have also been published in the collections David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels (Bloomsbury, 2014), Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). A short collaborative piece is in Joseph A. Dane’s Begging the Question: Critical Reading in Chaucer Studies, Book History, and Humanistic Inquiry (Mythodologies II) (Marymount Institute Press, 2019).

He has also conducted a number of critical interviews with important literary and cultural critics, including Jonathan Arac, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Anna Kornbluh (forthcoming May 2026), J. Hillis Miller (reprinted in Reading Inside Out: Interviews and Conversations [Sussex Academic Press, 2017]), Robert T. Tally Jr., and others in progress. These interviews have been or will be published in boundary 2.

Fest’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in over fifty journals or anthologies, including Adjacent Pineapple, The Aesthetic Directory, The After Happy Hour Review, The Airgonaut, Always Crashing (also here, here, and here), amberflora, Apocalypse Confidential, The Babel Tower Notice Board, BathHouse, Breakwater Review, Broken Lens Journal (and here and here), Call Me [Brackets], Cleaver, The Decadent Review (also here, here, and here), Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Does It Have Pockets, D.O.R (Deadly Orgone Radiation), Empty Mirror, Epigraph, Eunoia Review (and here), Flatbush Review, Flywheel, Grain, HVTN, IceFloe Press, The Kitchen Sink, Likely Red, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Magazine1, Mannequin Haus, Masque & Spectacle (also here), Matter, Nerve Cowboy, The Offbeat, Open Thread, Pamenar (and here), Osmosis, PELT, Pere Ube, Pine Hills Review, PLINTH, Poetics for the More-than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), Rabid Oak, The Second Chance Anthology (Variant Literature, 2020), Small Po[r]tions, Spork (and here and here), Sugar House Review, Tenebrae: A Journal of Poetics, The 2River View, TXTOBJX, Verse (a preview here), Version (9) (also here and here), and elsewhere.

Fest did his undergraduate work at the University of Arizona and holds an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English from the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught for many years. He has also taught at Carnegie Mellon University. At Hartwick, he was the 2022–25 Cora A. Babcock Chair in English and a 2019–20 Winifred D. Wandersee Scholar in Residence. He is the recipient of a Student Paper Award from the Science Fiction Research Association and the Schachterle Prize from the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and he has twice received nominations for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net.

At Hartwick, Fest is organizer of the Visiting Writers Series. He also organizes the Faculty Lecture Series and organized the Babcock Lecture from 2022–25 and was co-organizer of the 2024 Oneonta Literary Festival (with Tessa Yang) in conjunction with community partners from SUNY Oneonta, the Huntington Library, the Community Arts Network of Oneonta (CANO), the Green Toad Bookstore, B Side Ballroom and Supper Club, and the Oneonta City School District. He also chairs the Library and Educational Technology Committee and serves on the Faculty Development Committee and the Information Technology Committee.

Translations of Fest’s work into Slovenian have been published by Marko Bauer and Andrej Tomažin in IDIOT and Literatura.

Further information about Fest’s poetry, articles, presentations, and teaching materials can be found on his academia.edu page.

Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon, SoundCloud.

Bradley J. Fest’s curriculum vitae.

festb[at]hartwick[dot]edu