Michael D Snediker is a well known poet and a scholar of American literature and disability theory. He is Queens National Scholar and Assistant Professor of American Literature at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario. His poetry has appeared in The Cortland Review,1 The Paris Review,2 Blip Magazine, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackwarrior Review, Court Green, Crazyhorse, Jubilat, Margie, Pleiades. He has been nominated twice for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. His widely reviewed book Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). offers new readings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...

, Hart Crane

Hart Crane

-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...

, Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia...

, and Jack Spicer. He is currently at work on a new book, on “The Aesthetics of Disability: American Literature and Figurative Contingency.” He received his Ph.D in English from The Johns Hopkins University.

Selected Chapters and Articles

• “Is the Rectangle a Grave? Bersani, Rothko, and the Dream of Disability,” Collected Essays on Leo Bersani, ed. Mikko Tukkanen (SUNY Press, forthcoming).

• “Pierre and the Non-Transparencies of Figuration,” ELH (2010).

• “Subjunctivity,” Postmodern Culture 18.3 (2008).

• “Queer Optimism,” Postmodern Culture 16.3 (2006).

• “Stasis & Verve: Henry James and the Fictions of Patience,” The Henry James Review 27.1 (2006).