About me

Andrew Epstein

I am a Professor in the English Department at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.  I received my BA from Haverford College in 1992, and my Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 2000.   I’m the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford University Press), which focuses on Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka. My second book, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture was published by Oxford University Press in 2016.  My third book, The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945, appeared in early 2023 from Cambridge University Press.

I have published widely on poetry and 20th- and 21st-century literature, on such topics as the New York School of poets, Language poetry, surrealism, conceptual poetry, modernist and contemporary fiction, literature and pragmatist philosophy, the Oulipo, and African-American literature, on figures ranging from Shelley and Keats to William James, W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Francis Ponge, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, Amiri Baraka, James Schuyler, Rae Armantrout, Robert Lowell, Stanley Cavell, Joe Brainard, and Lou Reed.

Since 2013, I’ve been blogging about the New York School of poets at this site, Locus Solus.

My work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, American Literary History, American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Comparative Literature Studies, Jacket2, and Raritan, and in various essay collections, including The Cambridge Companion to American Poets, The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature, Wallace Stevens in Context, The New Wallace Stevens Studies, Elizabeth Bishop in Context, Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School, and The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets.