John Keene (writer)

John R. Keene Jr. (born 1965 in St. Louis, Missouri) is a writer, translator, professor, and artist.

Biography

John Keene was born and raised in the city of St. Louis, and in Webster Groves, in St. Louis County. He attended parochial schools, graduated from the Saint Louis Priory School,[1] and has an A.B. from Harvard College, where he was a member of the Harvard Black Community and Student Theater (C.A.S.T.) and served as co-Circulation Manager and on the Art Board of the Harvard Advocate. He received an M.F.A. from New York University, where he was a New York Times Foundation Fellow. He was a longtime member of the Dark Room Collective, an organization that from 1988 to 1998 celebrated and gave greater visibility to emerging and established writers of color, and also is a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem.

Formerly associate professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern University, Illinois, United States, he now is Associate Professor of English, chairs the African American and African Studies department, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Program at Rutgers University-Newark.[2] He has taught at Brown and NYU, and at the Indiana University Writer's Conference.

His first novel, Annotations, was published by New Directions in 1995. Publishers Weekly wrote that "Annotations is a work that should not be ignored and is worthy of the highest recommendation. It is an experimental text that points a new direction for literary fiction in the 21st century."[3] A collection of poems entitled Seismosis, in conversation with artwork by Christopher Stackhouse, was published by 1913 Press in 2006.[4]

In May 2015, New Directions published Counternarratives, his collection of short fiction, including several novellas,[5] In its review Publishers Weekly described the book as "suspenseful, thought provoking, mystical, and haunting....Keene's confident writing doesn't aim for easy description or evaluation; it approaches (and defies) literature on its own terms."[6] In her May 2015 review of Counternarratives in Harper's Magazine, Christine Smallwood said of Keene and the collection, "Counternarratives is an extraordinary work of literature. Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer."[7] For this and earlier work, he received a 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.[8]

UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions released a British edition of Counternarratives in 2016.[9] Reviewer Kate Webb wrote in her TLS review of Counternarratives that "the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of [Keene's] remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own. His book achieves no less than an imaginative repositioning of the history of the Americas."[10] In November 2016 Counternarratives was nominated to the Longlist for the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.[11] In August 2016, Counternarratives was awarded an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation.[12]

GRIND, an art-poetry collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, was published in February 2016 by ITI Press. A chapbook of old and new poems, Playland, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in September 2016.

In 2014, Letters from a Seducer, his translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst's 1991 novel Cartas de um sedutor, was published by Nightboat Books and A Bolha Editora.[13] This translation was selected for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist.[14] He has published translations from French, Portuguese and Spanish, of work by writers including Alain Mabanckou,[15] Mateo Morrison, Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, Claudia Roquette-Pinto, and Jean Wyllys, among others. He also has given talks and published essays on translation, including "Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness," one of a series of essays curated by poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky that appears on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog; the essay advocates for increased translation of poets of African descent, poets who consider themselves "black" (in Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands), and other poets of color across the globe.[16]

Artistic Projects

Keene also has engaged in public and durational conceptual events such as the "Emotional Outreach Project", under the rubric of the Field Research Study Group A, beginning in 2002. He has exhibited his work several times at This Red Door's short-term galleries, in Brooklyn[17] and Berlin in 2013,[18] and in January 2014 introduced his "Emotional Outreach Project 6.0: The Emotional Exercises," at TRD's space at Kunsthalle Galapagos in Brooklyn.[19]

Bibliography

Awards

References

  1. ↑ New Directions Author Page for John Keene
  2. ↑ Profile of John Keene at Rutgers–Newark
  3. ↑ http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8112-1304-2 Publishers Weekly Review of Annotations
  4. ↑ Bios of 2005 Whiting Writers' Award Recipients - Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Retrieved 9-20-06
  5. ↑ http://www.ndbooks.com/book/counternarratives/
  6. ↑ http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8112-2434-5 Publishers Weekly Review of John Keene's Counternarratives
  7. ↑ http://harpers.org/archive/2015/05/new-books-163/ Harper's Magazine: "New Books" by Christina Smallwood
  8. ↑ "John Keene: Lannan Literary Award for Fiction".
  9. ↑ https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/counternarratives John Keene's Counternarratives
  10. ↑ http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/exceed-every-limit/ TLS: "Exceed Every Limit" by Kate Webb
  11. ↑ http://www.republicofconsciousness.com/prize/ The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses
  12. ↑ http://www.beforecolumbusfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ABA-press-release-2016-final.pdf Before Columbus Foundation's Winners of the 37th Annual American Book Awards
  13. ↑ http://www.upne.com/1937658151.html
  14. ↑ http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=13982 Three Percent: 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist
  15. ↑ A Public Space: "You Who Are On Your Way Over There" by Alain Mabanckou
  16. ↑ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/04/translating-poetry-translating-blackness/ "Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness," by John Keene, Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog
  17. ↑ This Red Door: Emotional Outreach Project 5.0
  18. ↑ This Red Door at REH-Kunst Archive
  19. ↑ This Red Door Archive
  20. ↑ AGNI Awards Page

External links

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