Amy Moorman Robbins

Amy Moorman Robbins received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside in 2004. She researches and teaches modern and contemporary American poetry with a particular focus on avant-garde and experimental poetics, the politics of poetic form, and the work of feminist/women writers.  Her book, American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form (Rutgers UP, 2014), examines the ways in which genre-crossing works by five American women writing in the 20th and 21st centuries – Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine – intersect with mainstream mass culture such that new spaces are opened in which to re-consider the gender and race politics of the abiding high/low divide at the same time that these hybrid works constitute new directions in avant-garde poetics in the wake of the lyric vs. language model that has structured academic poetry criticism since the 1990s.  Hers is the first book to undertake a close examination of American hybrid poetry in the context of the ongoing debate surrounding the politics of the form that is currently being waged among the post-Avant community and anthologists and editors of magazines publishing hybrid works.

Robbins has published articles in Contemporary Literature, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Pacific Coast Philology, and Studies in the Humanities, and current projects include the Palgrave Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism of American Poetry After World War II, which she is co-authoring with Steven Gould Axelrod.  She is the president and co-founder of the Gertrude Stein Society, which can be found at gertrudesteinsociety.org.

Selected Publications:

American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form. Rutgers University Press, 2014.

“Laura Mullen’s Trilogy of Trash.” Pacific Coast Philology 51.1 (Spring 2016).

Interview with Laura Mullen. Pacific Coast Philology 51.1 (Spring 2016). 

“Affective Identification, Critical Production: Leslie Scalapino’s ‘hmmmm.’” Studies in the Humanities 41.1-2 (Spring 2015).

“‘Lizzie Do You Mind.’: Gertrude Stein’s Laws of Genre in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 17.1 (January 2013): 25-39.

"Harryette Mullen's Sleeping With the Dictionary and Race in Language/Writing."  Contemporary Literature 51.2 (Summer 2010): 341-370.

 “Alice Notley’s Post-Confessional I: Toward a Poetics of Postmodern Witness.” Pacific Coast Philology 41 (Fall 2006): 76-90.