Dr. Jon Thompson

Professor

• Website: http://www.jon-thompson.net
• Vita: download vita

• Email: jon_thompson@ncsu.edu
• Phone: 919-515-4157
• Office: Tompkins Hall 241
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Biography

Jon Thompson is a Professor of English at North Carolina State University where he teaches courses primarlly in twentieth-century/contemporary American and British literature. He maintains a particular interest in contemporary poetry and poetics. He did his Ph.D. at LSU and then came as an Assistant Professor to the English Department at NCSU. Before the Ph.D., he took a B.A. and an M.A. at University College, Dublin (his Master's thesis was on the problem of communication in Robert Creeley's poetry).

His current work comes out of his career as a poet, critic and editor. He is the founding editor of the international, online journal Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, launched in 2001 and also the editor of the single-author poetry series, Free Verse Editions, launched in 2005.

Interests

*Poetry

*The lyric essay

*Authorship

*The fate of American writing

*Literary responses to violence

*Poetry and the visual arts

*Editing poetry in print and online environments

Projects

At the moment, my writing is focused on a manuscript of poems, tentatively titled Landscape with Light. 

Landscape with Light, a book-length series of poems, focuses on landscapes in iconic American films. This project explores the resonance of place—whether as a landscape or a urban landscape—in poetry and the ways in which the voice of the poem can play across those imagined environments. Poems in this manuscript take up a variety of defining American landscapes—the ravaged South in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the deserts in John Ford’s The Searchers or Roman Polanski's neo-noir version of Los Angeles in Chinatown, for example, and seek to read the emblematic images in film as compelling for the contemporary moment.

My editing work is always ongoing: Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics is a bi-annual and Free Verse Editions, published by Parlor Press, publishes 3-5 original collections (or original translations) each year.

 

Publications

Books

*After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing (Shearsman, 2009)
*The Book of the Floating World (Expanded edition, Parlor Press, 2007)
*Fiction, Crime and Empire (University of Illinois Press 1993)

Poetry

The Book of the Floating World (2007). Individual poems published in Colorado Review, Witness, Conjunctions online, Carolina Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Quarterly West, Third Coast, Horizon Review, Vallum Magazine, Shearsman Magazine, New Ohio Review, 1913: A Journal of Forms, Cutbank, Cue, Fascicle and elsewhere

Essays

Essays in journals such as Identity Theory, Massachusetts Review, Genre, Literature and History and Works and Days

Introduction to D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (Shearsman, 2011)

Education

• Ph.D. in Twentieth-century American/British Literature from LSU