Jed Rasula

Read poems by this poet

Jed Rasula is Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia, a position that he has held since 2001. Rasula earned his PhD from University of California, Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness Program. 

Rasula is the author of numerous books of poetry and scholarship. His books of poetry include Hectic Pigment (Opo Books & Objects, 2017); Hot Wax, or Psyche’s Drip (BookThug, 2007); and Tabula Rasula: Being a Book of Audible Visual Matters (Station Hill Press, 1986). He has also published translations in his anthologies Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (Action Books, 2012), co-edited with Tim Conley, and Imagining Language: An Anthology (The MIT Press, 1998), coedited with Steve McCaffery. 

Rasula’s scholarship largely focuses on Modernism. His more recent titles include What the Thunder Said (Princeton University Press, 2022), a study of The Waste Land’s impact on modern culture and poetry; Acrobatic Modernism, from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory (Oxford University Press, 2020); History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2016), which earned the Matei Calinescu Prize from the Modern Language Association; and a history of Dada, titled Destruction Was My Beatrice (Basic Books 2015). 

Rasula’s other honors include the 2009 Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, the 1999 Postmodern Culture prize for Best Essay, the 1992 Frank Knox Award for Excellence in Teaching, awarded by Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and the 1987 General Electric Younger Writers Award. 

Before earning his PhD, Rasula worked in radio and television in Hollywood. He also edited the poetry magazine Wch Way from 1976 to 1984. From 1999 to 2000, he served on the editorial board of the now defunct literary magazine Sulfur: A Literary Tri-Annual of the Whole Art. He has also served on the advisory board of PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), a journal of the Modern Language Association, and on the editorial board of American Literature journal, published by Duke University Press.