School of Critical Studies

John Keene is the author of the novel Annotations; the poetry collection Seismosis (in collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse), translator of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst’s notorious erotic novel, Letters from a Seducer, and author of the short fiction collection Counternarratives, which received an American Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award in 2016, and in 2017, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, as well as the UK’s inaugural 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.  Keene’s other published work includes GRIND, an art-text collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner; and the poetry chapbook, Playland.  He is also the 2005 recipient of a Whiting Award in Fiction and Poetry. In the fall of 2018, he was awarded a five-year John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, for his work “exploring the impact of historical narratives on contemporary lives and re-imagining the history of the Americas from the perspective of suppressed voices.”