Category: Poetry

Poets and children's literature aficionados no doubt know that celebrated American writer X.J. Kennedy turned 83 this week.  A textbook and children's lit author, poet, teacher, and translator, Kennedy has earned many literary awards throughout his distinguished career, from the 1961 Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets (now known as the James Laughlin Award) and the Los Angeles…

Poets and children's literature aficionados no doubt know that celebrated American writer X.J. Kennedy turned 83 this week.  A textbook and children's lit author, poet, teacher, and translator, Kennedy has earned many literary awards throughout his distinguished career, from the 1961 Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets (now known as the James Laughlin Award) and the Los Angeles…

By Peter Filkins Randall Jarrell famously said that writing poetry was like walking across an open field waiting to be struck by lightning. In reverse fashion, Robert Frost’s dictum, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader,” makes the same point about the need for the poet to be surprised by his own…

Guest post by Christopher N. Phillips What place does storytelling have in literary history today?  I didn’t expect this to be a central question in my book, Epic in American Culture, but the more I explored the topic, the more I realized that storytelling caused many of the problems I faced in this project—and story…

To serious scholars, students, and aficionados of American poetry, Hart Crane needs no introduction. A controversial and troubled figure, Crane was born in 1899 to the inventor of Life Savers candy and killed himself in 1933 by jumping off a steamship into the Gulf of Mexico. His tragic and beautiful work profoundly influenced and inspired poets such as…

February was a banner month for the JHU Press. We were invited into Amish homes, celebrated International Polar Bears Day, and launched a video series that stars the “academic verve” of our journal editors (more on that below). Here’s some more of what we’ve been up to in Charm City lately. Let’s hope March is just …

by Dean Smith, Director, Project MUSE One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. —Hart Crane I first discovered the books of the Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) through a copy of When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore,…