Graduate Cluster
The Poetry & Poetics Graduate Cluster is an interdisciplinary group of scholars and writers who share an interest in the long and varied tradition named by “poetics” and in the particular structures of thought that poetry articulates across languages and over time. Our highly engaged membership includes students and faculty from across the language-focused humanities fields, as well as scholars working in ethnic, area, and performance studies. Cluster faculty and students work together to generate theoretically innovative accounts of the poetries of the near and distant past, as well as of marginalized communities in the U.S. and abroad.
Members of the Graduate Cluster in Poetry & Poetics are core participants in the multi-platform initiatives of the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium (PPC), which is Northwestern’s central forum for the performance, discussion, and study of poetry and poetics. Students interested in pursuing a PhD in African-American Studies, Art History, Comparative Literary Studies, English, French and Italian, German Literature and Critical Thought, Music, Performance Studies, Philosophy, Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Theatre and Drama are encouraged to find a second intellectual “home” in this interdisciplinary cluster.
For more information, visit our page at The Graduate School’s website.
Current Graduate Students
Dawn Angelicca Barcelona
Dawn Angelicca Barcelona (she/her) is a candidate in the Litowitz MFA+MA program at Northwestern University. Her chapbook, Roundtrip, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025.
Laiba Niaz Paracha
Laiba Niaz Paracha is a PhD student in the Comparative Literary Studies Program, and her home Department is Asian Languages and Cultures. Her comparative work attempts to demonstrate the relevance of lyric interiority in unsettling neo-colonial territorialities and...
Yẹmí Ajíṣebútú
Yẹmí Ajíṣebútú (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Comparative Literary Studies Program. Her research focuses on the Being of the Diasporic self in the United States in contemporary narratives of African (Nigerian) descent writers, Art, Enslavement, and Oriki.
Isaac Ginsberg Miller
Isaac Ginsberg Miller (he/they) is a PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern University. Isaac's chapbook Stopgap won The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest, and was published in 2019.
Katana Smith
Katana Smith (she/her) is a poet from Aurora, Colorado, a McNair Scholar, and a candidate in the MFA+MA program at Northwestern University.
Irene Kim
Irene Kim is a PhD candidate in the English department. Her research focuses on the aesthetics of ambience in experimental Asian American film, art, literature, and performance from 1980 to the present.
Kira Tucker
Kira Tucker (she/they) is an artist from Memphis and a current MFA+MA candidate in poetry at Northwestern University. Kira's latest creative project is all about dreams and dreaming—a poetic investigation spanning the mythos of the American Dream and the landscapes of...
George Abraham
George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet in the Litowitz MFA+MA program. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Kayla Boyden
Kayla Boyden (she/her) is a PhD student in the Northwestern University English department. Her research interests include Black contemporary poetry and poetics, Black feminist thought, and Black critical theory.
Ryan Nhu
Ryan Nhu (he/him) is a PhD student in English at Northwestern, where he researches post-1945 multiethnic American literature with interests in psychoanalysis, queer of color critique, and interracial desire.
Viola Bao
Viola Bao is a PhD student in the Northwestern Comparative Literature Department. Their research focuses on documentary poetics.
Smith Yarberry
Smith Yarberry (they/them) is a PhD student in the Northwestern English department. Their research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century receptions of William Blake. Smith's first book of poems, A Boy in the City, is now out from Deep Vellum.
Avey Rips
Avey Rips is a PhD student in the Northwestern English Department. Their research concerns 20th and 21st century American poetry with a focus on transportation and technology.
Cluster Alumni Highlights