Kent Shaw
Departments
Programs
Creative Writing, English, Digital Humanities, Women’s and Gender Studies, Global Literary Studies
Contact
About
Main Interests
I’m interested in teaching poetry as both literature and writing process. In my experience, these two approaches to poetry have intersected and woven together to surprising effect. I am an active reader, and I do my best to guide students to find what active reading looks like for them.
Since coming to Wheaton I have taken an active interest in exploring innovative pedagogical practices by participating in programs offered by Wheaton’s Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning (CCTL). In particular, I have used online pedagogy and classroom interactive technologies to chronicle classroom discussions. My ambition is to build a common reference students and I can use throughout the semester. For me, knowledge is not a static history I instruct my students to memorize, it is a dynamic piecing together of information. And, like a good poem, it should present a complex and rich and personal interconnection.
Degrees
Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing, University of Houston, May 2011
MFA in Creative Writing, Washington University, May 2003
BA in English Literature, University Missouri-St. Louis, cum laude, January 1999
Publications
Poetry:
- “My fear is that someone would invent a tool to untether me,” from Cincinnati Review (available at Academy of American Poets)
- “Stones,” from New Orleans Review
- “What we did about a world that kept getting very loud,” from Vinyl Poetry
- “Always was being so always around us that we had to put always on the insides of us” from jubilat
- “Dear Mark Doty, are you the man I met 10 years ago?“, “Definitions of lucky are too numerous,” from Miracle Monocle
- “Actually, this poem belongs to my wife,” from Denver Quarterly
- “People don’t understand what an emotion normally look like,” from TYPO
- “My city is not called Ladders“, “Really, there is no end to ambition,” from Memorious
- “A story from my romantic past. It was full of misgivings”, “The definition of OK when you’re only kind of OK,” from Hobart
- “Now I know what maturity is. Thank you, wool!” from Guernica
- “The boxes were arranged so they formed a Leviathan,” from Hayden’s Ferry Review
Book reviews:
- “A Story of I, Self-Conscious Me,” from FENCE Digital
- “On Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling,” from Kenyon Review Online
- Review of Lisa Ciccarello’s At Night, from The Rumpus
- “Complicated Love: On Joanna Klink’s Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy,” from Fanzine
- “What Are We Violence? Jennifer Mackenzie’s My Not My Soldier,” from Fanzine
Books:
- Too Numerous (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019)
- Calenture (University of Tampa Press, 2008)