Poets as Public Scholars:
Contemporary Poetics in an Age of Social Media
Published by University of Michigan Press on July 7, 2026
Praise for Poets as Public Scholars:
“Poets as Public Scholars examines how an artist-scholar may gain new insights into the material as they work with it. As poets and other artists begin to break the expectations of what a book can and cannot do, C. R. Grimmer is doing the same with learning.”
– Tyree Daye, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of a little bump in the earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and River Hymns (American Poetry Review, 2017)
Poets as Public Scholars is a multimedia book that interrogates how poet-scholars use digital platforms to expand access and visibility for underrepresented voices, but also to critique the commodification, extraction, and erasure practices embedded in neoliberal literary circulation.
Framed by two core questions—how poets teach public scholarship through networked media, and how to support underrepresented poets without reinforcing market-driven erasure—the collection offers videos for student and public engagement, essays for scholarly audiences, and discussion questions for classroom use.
Structured around seven video dialogues and seven critical essays, the book features contributions from poet-scholars including Camea Davis, A.D. Carson, Tyrone Williams, Patrick Milian, Stevi Costa, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Woogee Bae. Each chapter examines the material and affective economies that shape poetic production and reception, while proposing alternative, community-rooted infrastructures for literary and cultural labor.
Designed for layered audiences, the video interviews model public-facing discourse, while the companion essays situate the work within critical conversations in literature, cultural theory, and media studies. With included discussion questions by Dr. Molly Ubbesen (University of Minnesota Rochester) and open access availability, Poets as Public Scholars functions as both a teaching tool and a theoretical intervention for scholars and educators seeking to integrate anti-racist, anti-capitalist approaches to literary and digital humanities pedagogy.
You can read and watch Poets as Public Scholars online and for free thanks to the generous support of the The Eugene B. Power Fund as part of the Digital Cultures Series at University of Michigan Press.