John Shoptaw

John Shoptaw, a leading voice in ecopoetics, is widely published in many of the most respected literary journals and magazines, including Arion, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry.  His first poetry collection, Times Beach (2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in Poetry.  

In Near-Earth Object, Shoptaw explores the interactions, sometimes dark and sometimes joyful, between humans and the non-human natural world. Resisting the human exceptionalism that in its many forms can block imaginative access to the world, Shoptaw entertains the perspectives of a host of others: a cricket, a bat, a nuthatch, a carnival bear, a tree’s shade, cherubim, an asteroid, and Earth herself.

John Shoptaw teaches in the UC Berkeley English Department.  He is the author of On the Outside Looking Out:  John Ashbery’s Poetry, the libretto for Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin (Boston Modern Orchestra Project), and a number of essays on poetry and poetics, including “Why Ecopoetry?” (Poetry).

Listen to John Shoptaw on podcasts from Authors Unbound and Chrysalis.