HomeAcademicsPeopleNews and EventsResourcesSite Map
UCLA Department of English
People :: Faculty
Faculty Text Size: Default Larger Largest
 
Yenser, Stephen
 
Yenser, Stephen
Distinguished Professor
Humanities 288
Tel: 310.825.6851
Fax: 310.267.4339
Send E-mail

 

 

 

 

 

Interests

Stephen Yenser is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at UCLA, where he has received the Harvey L. Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. He curates the Hammer Poetry Readings at the Hammer Museum in Westwood and teaches courses in the writing of poems and in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry. He has directed or co-directed Ph.D. dissertations on such subjects as the work of Elizabeth Bishop, the poetry of Jorie Graham, the work of James Merrill and Stéphane Mallarmé, the writing of Gertrude Stein, Charles Simic and exile, the poems of W. S. Merwin, the poems of Galway Kinnell, the novels of Nabokov, American women poets, assimilation and twentieth-century American-Jewish poets, the Bible in contemporary American poetry, strategies of self in the postmodern era, and Pragmatism and American poetics.

Selected Works

Yenser’s book of poems entitled Blue Guide was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006.  The Fire in All Things, his previous volume of poems, received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.  His other recognitions include a Discovery/The Nation Poetry Award, the Bernard F. Connors Prize from The Paris Review, an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, two Fulbright Fellowships, and two appearances in The Best American Poetry series. The author of three critical books—Circle to Circle:  The Poetry of Robert Lowell (University of California Press), The Consuming Myth:  The Work of James Merrill (Harvard University Press), and A Boundless Field:  American Poetry at Large (University of Michigan Press in the Poets on Poetry Series)—he is also co-editor of James Merrill’s work (the four volumes published so far are the Collected Poems, the Collected Novels and Plays, the Collected Prose, and The Changing Light at Sandover, all from Alfred A. Knopf, while the Selected Poems will appear in 2008, and the Selected Letters are underway).   He has recently completed a collection of essays tentatively entitled Extravagant Engagements:  American Poetry beyond the Pale.
 

 

           

 149 Humanities Building • Box 951530 • Los Angeles • CA 90095-1530
 Tel: 310.825.4173  Fax: 310.267.4339
 © 2008 UC Regents 

UCLA home University of California College of Letters & Science Humanities Division Disability Resources Disability Resources Campus Safety
Last Modified: November 17, 2008