Joan Retallack

Who is Joan Retallack?

Joan Retallack is an American poet, critic, biographer, and multi-disciplinary scholar. She is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College where she teaches courses in poetics, poethics, and experimental traditions in the arts. Retallack directed the Language & Thinking Program at Bard for ten years and is currently participating in the development of an Arabic Language & Thinking Program at Al-Quds University, the Palestinian university in Jerusalem. Retallack has read and performed her poetry, lectured, and participated in conferences, festivals, and invited residencies in Canada, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Her work has been translated into six languages. In 2009, she delivered the Judith E. Wilson Poetics Lecture at Cambridge University, which hosted a two-day conference on her work. Her interests in poetics include polylingualism, ecopoetics, and the poethics of alterity.