John Keene (writer)

John R. Keene Jr. (born 1965 in St. Louis, Missouri) is a writer and translator. He graduated from the Saint Louis Priory School,[1] and has an A.B. from Harvard College and an M.F.A. from New York University. 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 and African American and African studies and teaches in the MFA in Creative Program at Rutgers University-Newark.[2] He has taught at Brown and NYU.

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]

Keene's most recent book, GRIND, is an art-text collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, published in February 2016 by ITI Press.

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.[8] This translation was selected for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist.[9] He has published translations from French, Portuguese and Spanish, of work by writers including Alain Mabanckou,[10] Mateo Morrison, Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, Claudia Roquette-Pinto, and Jean Wyllys, among others.

Keene also has engaged in conceptual projects 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[11] and Berlin in 2013,[12] and in January 2014 introduced his "Emotional Outreach Project 6.0: The Emotional Exercises," at TRD's space at Kunsthalle Galapagos in Brooklyn.[13]

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. ↑ http://www.upne.com/1937658151.html
  9. ↑ http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=13982 Three Percent: 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist
  10. ↑ A Public Space: "You Who Are On Your Way Over There" by Alain Mabanckou
  11. ↑ This Red Door: Emotional Outreach Project 5.0
  12. ↑ This Red Door at REH-Kunst Archive
  13. ↑ This Red Door Archive
  14. ↑ AGNI Awards Page

External links

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