I am so thrilled to have received in the mail Sofia Escobar‘s first chapbook today, Sky Scorpion, published this month by Chicago-based dancing girl press and studio. Sofia was my student at Hartwick College, graduated in 2024, and is currently an MFA student at Hollins University. Sky Scorpion was her senior thesis.
I have published “Teaching Without Computers” in the “Interventions” section of the b2o review at b2o: “boundary 2” online. I delivered a short version of this paper at SUNY Oneonta in August and the full version I’ll be presenting for a Teaching Table at Hartwick College tomorrow.
Thanks to Arne De Boever of boundary 2 and to Racheal Fest and Alanna E. F. Rudzik for helping me work out some of the ideas in this essay. Thanks also to the Faculty Development Committee and the members of the ad-hoc human-centered learning group organized by Karl Seeley. And, of course, thanks to all my students for a great semester.
So this “now”
now emerges, shadows be-fallen here,
and we debate
how vast the eulogy we need.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The Entanglements: a representation”
The zone between the living voice
and the posthumous voice
is poetry.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The moon and modulations of lonely”
I am so very deeply saddened by the passing of Rachel Blau DuPlessis on September 2, 2026.[1] After hearing from her partner, Robert DuPlessis, I found myself weeping in my office for nearly a half hour last week, staggered by the magnitude of losing her. And so I wanted to write a little about how I got to know Rachel and her work, hoping it might provide a small glimpse into just how incredible a person, artist, and scholar/critic she was and the kind of massive positive effect she had on the people around her, even to someone who was only lightly connected to her.
***
Continue readingThe Department of Literature, Media, and Writing and the creative writing program at Hartwick College will present two readings in the 2026–27 Visiting Writers Series. Readings take place at 7:00 p.m. in the Eaton Lounge in Bresee Hall at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York.
Tessa Yang will be reading from her brand-new book, The Jellyfish Problem (Berkeley, 2026), on Wednesday, September 23, 2026.
And David James Keaton will be reading on Thursday, April 8, 2027. Keaton’s recent books include Head Cleaner (Polis Books, 2023; repr. Datura, 2026) and Shallow Ends (Podium Publishing, 2024).
For more information, visit the Visiting Writers Series webpage.
I will be giving a talk, “Teaching Without Computers,” twice over the next month at the State University of New York, Oneonta and at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. This talk grows out of my experience eliminating technology from my classroom and moving all writing to in-class assignments during the spring 2026 semester.
For the SUNY talk, I will be delivering a shortened version of it at the Regional Perspectives on AI cross-campus symposium this Friday, August 14, 2026 at 11:00 a.m. in Le Cafe in the Morris Conference Center as part of the panel Against AI: Approaches to Preserving Student Learning with my colleagues at SUNY Oneonta Racheal Fest and Alanna E. F. Rudzick. Here is a description of our panel:
In this session, faculty from the humanities and social sciences at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College will share approaches to preserving student learning in the age of AI. Strategies include developing in-class assessment practices, updating assignments to include critical AI literacy, creating an analog classroom to better foster discussion and knowledge co-construction, and inviting students to reflect on the nature and purpose of higher education and of writing as a practice. Presenters will share assignments from different disciplinary contexts and facilitate a conversation about recent challenges and successes.
And then I will be delivering a full version of “Teaching Without Computers” for a Teaching Table at Hartwick College on Friday, September 18, 2026. I hope to be publishing a version of this talk around this time as well. (I will update when I know more.)
This fall, the Faculty Development Committee and the Office of Academic Affairs at Hartwick College will present two speakers in the annual Faculty Lecture Series.
All talks (unless noted) take place at during the common hour: 12:20–1:20 p.m. in Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall at Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York.
The lectures are free and open to the public.
Joseph Von Stengel, “AI-Empowered Creativity,” Friday, September 11, 2026.
Laurel Elder, “Public Opinion on Abortion in Post-Dobbs America,” Friday, October 9, 2026 (book launch for Not Going Back: Public Opinion on Abortion in Post-“Dobbs” America, co-authored with Steven Greene and Mary-Kate Lizotte).
For more information, visit the Faculty Lecture Series webpage.
(And this is my last year organizing the Faculty Lecture Series!)
I increasingly think that Anna Kornbluh is one of our most important critics, and so I was overwhelmingly delighted to be able to bring her to Hartwick College to deliver the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture during the 2024 Oneonta Literary Festival. I was also extremely honored that she agreed to sit down with me the next day to discuss her work and career. That interview has now been published as “Art Is for Everybody: An Interview with Anna Kornbluh” in boundary 2 (vol. 53, no. 2; the link to the interivew should work for three months.)
Here’s an abstract of the interview:
This interview with literary critic Anna Kornbluh was conducted on October 18, 2024, in conjunction with her delivery of the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College. With her most recent book, Immediacy; or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), Kornbluh has established herself as one of the most insightful and important critics of contemporary culture. In this conversation, she reflects on how she came to literary studies, the strangeness of realism, dialectical reading, and the role of style in literary criticism. Kornbluh also discusses political formalism and the value of institutions, the term neoliberalism, social media, the relationship between organizing and literary study, recent projects on climate counteraesthetics and middlebrow aesthetics, and the political realities of late 2024.
In further interview news, I have conducted and am currently transcribing and editing an interview with Paul A. Bové.
And for previous interviews: “An Interview with Jonathan Arac,” “Grateful and Generous Reading: An Interview with Robert T. Tally Jr.,” “Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” and “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller.”
I am really happy that my interview with Robert T. Tally Jr.—the first of two interviews I conducted in conjunction with The Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College, which I organized as Cora A. Babcock Chair in English from 2022–25—is now out in print. “Grateful and Generous Reading: An Interview with Robert T. Tally Jr.,” has just been published in the November 2025 issue of boundary 2 (vol. 52, no. 4).
It was a busy weekend—in the course of only a few days, Tally flew to Oneonta from Texas, delivered a lecture, sat down for an interview, and then moderated the final Zoom panel celebrating Fredric Jameson’s ninetieth birthday from my home office (all while he was in the middle of editing Verso’s “Jameson at 90” [2025] blog series)—and so I am deeply thankful to Tally for taking the time to come to Hartwick and chat.
Here’s an abstract of the interview:
This interview with literary critic Robert T. Tally Jr. was conducted on April 26, 2024, in conjunction with his delivery of the 2023–24 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College. Tally is one of the premier critics presently working in the field of spatial literary studies and has published over a dozen books and over one hundred articles and book chapters on US and world literature, critical theory, and the history of criticism. Reflecting broadly on the trajectory of his career, Tally discusses the gratitude that has accompanied his scholarly writing, his interests in spatial literary studies, his relationship with the teaching and work of Jonathan Arac, Paul A. Bové, and Fredric Jameson, and the role of theory at the present time.
The second interview conducted in conjunction with the 2025 Babcock Lecture, my interview with Anna Kornbluh, will appear in the May 2026 issue of boundary 2.
And for previous interviews: “An Interview with Jonathan Arac,” “Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” and “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller.”
I will have a table with my books for sale—2013–2017: Sonnets (LJMcD Communications, 2024) and perhaps one copy of The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015)—at Author Expo 2025 in Oneonta, New York on Sunday, October 12 from 2:00–4:00 p.m. at the Foothills Performing Arts Center (24 Market St, Oneonta, NY 13820).
Author Expo 2025 is put on by the Writers Salon at the Community Arts Network of Oneonta and the Huntington Memorial Library.
I was so busy this fall I fell behind on pretty much everything, so I’m making up for it with a big two-season link post, roughly mid-May until the end of 2024.
Nuclear and Environmental
The Editorial Board of The New York Times, “The President’s Arsenal.”
Elizabeth Kolbert, “When the Arctic Melts” and “Why Hurricane Milton Is a Sign of the New Abnormal.”
Damian Carrington, “Earth’s ‘Vital Signs’ Show Humanity’s Future in Balance, Say Climate Experts” and “‘No Sign’ of Promised Fossil Fuel Transition as Emissions Hit New High.”
Patrick Greenfield, “Trees and Land Absorbed Almost no CO2 Last Year. Is Nature’s Carbon Sink Failing?”
Kathleen Kingsbury, W.J. Hennigan, and Spencer Cohen, “The Last Survivors [of Hiroshima] Speak. It’s Time to Listen.”
Megan Specia and Lynsey Chutel, “Nobel Updates: Peace Prize Is Awarded to Japanese Group of Atomic Bomb Survivors.”
Christopher Kempf, “Disaster Triumphant.”
David E. Sanger, “Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat.”
William Langewiesche, “The Secret Pentagon War Game That Offers a Stark Warning for Our Times.”
W. J. Hennigan, “The Price.”
Damian Carrington, “Hopeless and Broken: Why the World’s Top Climate Scientists Are in Despair.”
