About

Walt Hunter’s teaching and research are grounded in two fields: twentieth-century and contemporary poetry and global studies. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in American Literary History, Essays in Criticism, Modern Philology, minnesota review, New Literary History, and elsewhere. He writes about contemporary poetry in The Atlantic.

Hunter is at work on two new projects. The first is a book on the “house poem” in post-1945 American literature, under contract with Oxford University Press. The second is a book of poems, titled Some Flowers, forthcoming in 2022 from MadHat Press. Hunter’s first book, Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization, was published by Fordham University Press in 2019. Forms of a World shows how the forms of contemporary poetry are forged through the transformations of globalization from 1970 to the present. He is also the co-translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Frédéric Neyrat’s Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham UP, 2017) and a practicing poet. He was the 2017 South Carolina Arts Commission Artist Fellow in Poetry and his poems have appeared in the Harvard Advocate, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Prelude, Oversound, and other journals. Hunter is the recipient of a 2020 James Merrill House residency and multiple research and teaching awards, including CAAH Faculty Member of the Year for Excellence in Teaching.

Hunter received an A.B. in English, summa cum laude, from Harvard and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. He was a Henry Russell Shaw Fellow in Ireland and France from 2004-2005.