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John Keene (writer)

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John R. Keene Jr. (born 1965 in St. Louis, Missouri)[1] 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,[2] and has an Bachelor of Arts 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 Master of Fine Arts from New York University, where he was a New York Times Foundation Fellow.[3] 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 Distinguished Professor of English, chairs the African American and African Studies department, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Program at Rutgers University-Newark.[4] He has taught at Brown and NYU, and at the Indiana University Writer's Conference. For several years he has served as an editorial board member for the African Poetry Book Fund, which aims to promote contemporary poetry by African poets through a range of projects, including its book series, contests, workshops, seminars, and library-development efforts.

Creative Work

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."[5] A collection of poems entitled Seismosis, in conversation with artwork by Christopher Stackhouse, was published by 1913 Press in 2006.[6]

In May 2015, New Directions published Counternarratives, his collection of short fiction, including several novellas.[7] 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."[8] 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."[9] For this and earlier work, he received a 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.[10] In August 2016, Counternarratives was awarded an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation.[11]

UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions released a British edition of Counternarratives in 2016.[12] 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."[13] In March 2017 Fitzcarraldo was awarded the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses for Counternarratives, a unanimous decision by all six judges, who described Keene's collection as "a once in a generation achievement for short form fiction. Its subject matter, formal inventiveness, multitude of voices, and seriousness of purpose transform a series of thematically linked stories into a complete work of art."[14][15]

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.

Translation Projects

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.[16] This translation was selected for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist.[17] He has published translations from French, Portuguese and Spanish, of work by writers including Alain Mabanckou,[18] 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.[19]

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[20] and Berlin in 2013,[21] and in January 2014 introduced his "Emotional Outreach Project 6.0: The Emotional Exercises," at TRD's space at Kunsthalle Galapagos in Brooklyn.[20]

Publications

Awards and honors

Awards

Year Title Award Result Ref.
2000 "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" AGNI John Cheever Short Fiction Prize Winner [22]
2005 Whiting Award for Fiction and Poetry Winner [1]
2015 Best Translated Book Award Longlist [23]
2016 Counternarratives American Book Award Winner [24][25]
Lannan Literary Award for Fiction Winner [25]
Counternarratives William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction Finalist [26][27]
2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses Winner [28]
2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction Winner [29][30]
2022 Punks: New & Selected Poems Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry Winner [31]
Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry Winner [32]

Fellowships

Year Fellowship Foundation Ref.
1990 Fellowship in Fiction Artists Foundation of Massachusetts and Massachusetts Cultural Council
1998 Bread Loaf Fiction Fellow Bread Loaf Writer's Conference [33][34]
New York Times Fellow New York University [3][34]
Poetry Workshop Fellow Cave Canem Foundation [33][34]
1999 [34]
2003 Fellowship in Poetry New Jersey State Council on the Arts [23]
2008 Fellowship for Distinguished First Poetry Collection Pan-African Literary Forum [23]
2016 Lannan Foundation Residency Lannan Foundation
2018 MacArthur Fellowship MacArthur Foundation [1]

References

  1. ^ a b c "John Keene". Whiting. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  2. ^ "John Keene". www.ndbooks.com. September 8, 2011.
  3. ^ a b "July 29, 1998 | Middlebury News and Announcements". Middlebury. 1998-07-29. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  4. ^ "John Keene". Rutgers SASN. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  5. ^ http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8112-1304-2 Publishers Weekly Review of Annotations
  6. ^ Bios of 2005 Whiting Writers' Award Recipients - Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 9-20-06
  7. ^ "Counternarratives". www.ndbooks.com. May 17, 2016.
  8. ^ http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8112-2434-5 Publishers Weekly Review of John Keene's Counternarratives
  9. ^ http://harpers.org/archive/2015/05/new-books-163/ Harper's Magazine: "New Books" by Christina Smallwood
  10. ^ "John Keene: 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction". Lannan Foundation. lannan.org. Retrieved 2019-02-08.
  11. ^ 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
  12. ^ https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/counternarratives John Keene's Counternarratives
  13. ^ http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/exceed-every-limit/ TLS: "Exceed Every Limit" by Kate Webb
  14. ^ http://www.republicofconsciousness.com/2017/03/inaugural-republic-of-consciousness-prize-for-small-presses-awards/ The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses
  15. ^ http://www.thebookseller.com/news/keenes-counternarratives-wins-inaugural-republic-consciousness-priz-503481 The Bookseller, "Fitzcarraldo's Counternarratives wins inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize"
  16. ^ "Brandeis University Press".
  17. ^ http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=13982 Three Percent: 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist
  18. ^ "You Who Are On Your Way Over There : Magazine : A Public Space". apublicspace.org.
  19. ^ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/04/translating-poetry-translating-blackness/ "Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness," by John Keene, Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog
  20. ^ a b "This Red Door". this-red-door.
  21. ^ "PHP version not supported". www.schablonensammler.net.
  22. ^ "AGNI's Awards". AGNI Online. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  23. ^ a b c "John Keene". Jack Jones Literary Arts. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  24. ^ Desmangles, Justin (2016-08-12). "The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Thirty-Seventh Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS" (PDF). Before Columbus Foundation. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  25. ^ a b "John Keene". Lannan Foundation. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  26. ^ "John Keene". Jack Jones Literary Arts. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  27. ^ Karampelas, Gabrielle (2016-08-29). "Lori Jakiela and T. Geronimo Johnson win Stanford's 2016 Saroyan Prize for Writing". Stanford News. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  28. ^ Cain, Sian (2017-03-10). "Prize set up to reward 'brave, bold' publishers goes to Fitzcarraldo". the Guardian. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  29. ^ "John Keene". Windham Campbell Prizes. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  30. ^ Cummings, Mike (2018-03-07). "Yale awards eight writers $165,000 Windham-Campbell Prizes". YaleNews. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  31. ^ Segal, Corrine (2022-06-13). "Congratulations to the winners of the 2022 Lambda Literary Awards!". Literary Hub. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  32. ^ "Here Are the Winners of the 2022 Publishing Triangle Awards". The Publishing Triangle. 2022-05-11. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  33. ^ a b Keene, John (1999-10-15). "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of The American Revolution". AGNI Online. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
  34. ^ a b c d Foundation, Poetry (2022-06-16). "John Keene". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
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