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Srikanth Reddy is the author of Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), Voyager—named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and NPR—and Facts for Visitors, which won the 2005 Asian American Literary Award. He has written on poetry for The New York Times and The New Republic, and his book of literary criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The NEA, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have awarded him grants and fellowships, and in Fall 2015, he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, he is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
(Author photo by Kaitlyn Shea) -
Reviews
Reddy's bravery as a poet lies in his humbling acquiescence to a process that leads to such uncomfortable truths — how can we judge the dead, who "do not cease in the grave" and whose lives cannot help but serve as the material for shaping our world? How do we make the world different when we are faced with the dilemma of our essential sameness? By making a poem that is a new world out of an old text, Reddy invites us to imagine how we might remake the world out of our grievous histories.
—Los Angeles Review of Books"Elsewhere," to Reddy, is that place about which we never know enough. We pick up its signal in snatches of extinct, invented, or arcane dialect. Reddy's mastery—astonishing in its emotional depth, rhetorical facility, formal control, and lightness of touch—inheres in his marshalling of these snatches and bursts into fresh and unforgettable art.
—Boston ReviewEach time Reddy destroys the current state of the poem, a new one emerges, postponing annihilation.
—The American Reader
Reviews of Books by Srikanth Reddy
Underworld Lit (Aug 2020) -
Srikanth Reddy's website
Poems
- from Underworld Lit / XIII, XX (in jubilat)
- Selections from Underworld Lit/a> (in Verse)
Voyager, Book 3 / Chapter 6 (in Poetry Northwest)
- "The Twelve Hours of the Night" (on LitHub)
- "Untiled [Is is]" (on Poets.org)
- "First Circle" (on the Poetry Foundation)
- "Burial Practice" (on Poets.org)
- Four Poems (in Jacket2)
Interviews
- Knox Writers' House, with Suzanne Buffman
- Ransom Center Magazine, with Kathleen Telling
- Triple Canopy, with Lucy Ives
- NEA, with Suzanne Buffman
- Sentinel Poetry, with Amatoritsero Ede -
Video
Reading from "Underworld Lit" at the Creative Capital Retreat:
In the panel discussion "What is Poetry For" at the Poetry Foundation:
Reading with Ismail Muhammad for the Holloway Poetry Reading Series:
Reading with Sarah Riggs at The Poetry Project:
Reading "The Fundamentals of Esperanto" at the Kelly Writers' House:
