Widely regarded as “one of the most influential poetry critics of her generation” (New York Times), Burt is the author of several books of criticism and four volumes of poetry, including her latest, Advice from the Lights.
Burt’s works of criticism include The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Art of the Sonnet, written with David Mikics; The Forms of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence; Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden, written with Hannah Brooks-Motl; and Randall Jarrell and His Age.
Burt has published three collections of poems: Belmont, Parallel Play, and Popular Music. In October of 2017, Graywolf Press will publish Advice from the Lights, a new collection that finds the poet recalling “My 1982” and other specific childhood years.
In 2012, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile with the headline “Poetry’s Cross-Dressing Kingmaker,” identifying Burt publicly for the first time as transgender. Burt—who answers to Stephen, Steph, and Stephanie—has since written about having two genders in poetry works such as the chapbook “All-Season Stephanie,” as well as in essays such as “My Life as a Girl” and “The Body of the Poem.”
Burt, whose essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Review, and other publications, grew up in and around Washington, D.C., attended Harvard, Oxford, and Yale in the late 1980s and ’90s, and taught at Macalester College in Saint Paul for seven years before returning to Massachusetts and settling there.
Selected Works:
Criticism
Randall Jarrell and His Age (2002)
The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence (2007)
Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009)
The Art of the Sonnet (2010)
The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (2016)
Poetry
Popular Music (1999)
Parallel Play (2006)
Belmont (2013)
Advice from the Lights (2017)
