John R. Keene

Writer, translator, professor, and artist John R. Keene Jr. chairs the Department of African American and African Studies and is Distinguished Professor of English and African American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He He also teaches in the Rutgers-Newark MFA in Creative Writing Program.

He has published his fiction, poetry, essays, and translations in a wide array of journals and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His books include the novel Annotations; the poetry collection Seismosis, a collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse; the short fiction collection Counternarratives, and Punks: New & Selected Poems, which received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry. In addition to his own writing, Keene is a translator of Brazilian authors, as well as texts from Spanish and French. 

A longtime member of the Dark Room Writers Collective of Cambridge and Boston, and a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, Keene has taught at Brown University; Northwestern University, where he served as Director of the undergraduate Creative Writing Program and Acting Co-Director of the MA/MFA in Creative Writing Program; and other institutions. He served on the inaugural juries for the Cave Canem Second Book Prize and the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, both published by Northwestern University Press. He serves as a fiction and hybrid writing editor at the literary journal Obsidian, as an Advisory Editor for Transition, and as a Contributing Editor for the James Baldwin Review.