Laura Elrick

Laura is interested in the capacities of poetry to denaturalize the structures of everyday life and to imagine new forms of relation. Her most recent full-length collection What This Breathing was published by The Elephants in September 2020. Previous books include Propagation (2012), Fantasies in Permeable Structures (2005), and Skincerity (2003), as well as the chaplet Excerpts from ‘Permeable Structures: A Performance Essay in Stereo’ (2006). She has also written and directed several psychogeographical performance works, including Blocks Away (2010) and Stalk (2008), as well as an audio work, Five Pieces for Doubled Voice (2005). Her essay “Poetry, Ecology and the Reappropriation of Lived Space” has appeared in several anthologies, including Viz. Inter-Arts Intervention: A Trans-Genre Anthology and the Eco Language Reader. Various poetry and prose has been translated into French, Spanish, Finnish and Norwegian. She has lived in Brooklyn for over twenty years, the last eight with her four-legged buddy Topo.

From Laura: I enjoy working with students on many dimensions of the revision process: from exploring the possibilities of new projects, to deepening an articulation of vision in works that are already in process, and of course, fine-tuning nearly finished works. I take particular delight in considering meaningful form, in discovering relationships between literary form and social/personal embodiment, and in asking useful contextual questions (aesthetic, philosophical, political). My primary interests lie in poetry and performance.

BA, Media and Communication, University of Southern California; MA, Liberal Studies, The Graduate Center, CUNY, Thesis: “Affective Disobedience: Constructing Poetic Practice as Public Intervention”