Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor
avjordan@umich.eduOffice Information:
3155 AH
hours: Tuesdays 1-3pm
Creative Writing; Novel and Narrative; Poetry and Poetics; Visual Culture; Writing of Poetry; African American; Twentieth Century American; English
Education/Degree:
M.F.A. in Film from Vermont College of Fine ArtsM.F.A., Warren Wilson College, N.C. 1998
MA, Communications, Howard University, 1990
BA English, Wittenberg University, 1987
Certificate in Film Production & Screenwriting, Vancouver Film School, 2010-2011
Certificate in Film Studies, New York University, 1998
Highlighted Work and Publications
Rise
A. Van Jordan
In this superb and eagerly anticipated debut collection by the young African American poet A. Van Jordan, the energy and music of Jordan's language, his honesty of feeling and of truth telling, are matched by his freshness and power. "His stuff shines, sweat pours off it", says Joy Harjo. And there is a kind of solidity and reality in Jordan's poems that display varieties of experience and depths of meditation too rarely found in contemporary American poetry.
M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A
A. Van Jordan
In 1936, teenager MacNolia Cox became the first African American finalist in the National Spelling Bee Competition. Supposedly prevented from winning, the precocious child who dreamed of becoming a doctor was changed irrevocably. Her story, told in a poignant nonlinear narrative, illustrates the power of a pivotal moment in a life.
Quantum Lyrics
A. Van Jordan
Employing both narrative and cinematic structure, A. Van Jordan re-creates the lives of his subjects: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, comic-book superheroes (The Green Lantern, The Atom), along with aspects of himself revealed in poems of recollection and loss. With lyric intensity he suggests that contemporary physicists are also metaphysical poets.
The Cineaste: Poems
A. Van Jordan
A remarkable montage of poems that explore film, poetry, and the elusiveness of reverie.
A. Van Jordan, an acclaimed American poet and the author of three previous volumes, “demonstrates poetry’s power to be at once intimate and wide-ranging” (Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World). In this penetrating new work he takes us with him to the movies, where history reverberates and characters are larger than life. The Cineaste is an entrancing montage of poems, wherein film serves as the setting for contemplative trances, memoir, and pure...
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Current Courses
ENGLISH 424-002
Advanced Poetry Writing
ENGLISH 574-002
Workshop in Writing Poetry
