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Srikanth Reddy’s latest books include the Bagley Wright Lecture book, The Unsignificant (Wave Books, September 2024), and his book of poetry, Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), which was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He is currently the poetry editor of The Paris Review, and a co-editor of the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. The recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Reddy is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.
(Author photo by Kaitlyn Shea) -
Reviews
Reddy's bravery as a poet lies in his humbling acquiescence to a process that leads to such uncomfortable truths — how can we judge the dead, who "do not cease in the grave" and whose lives cannot help but serve as the material for shaping our world? How do we make the world different when we are faced with the dilemma of our essential sameness? By making a poem that is a new world out of an old text, Reddy invites us to imagine how we might remake the world out of our grievous histories.
Los Angeles Review of Books"Elsewhere," to Reddy, is that place about which we never know enough. We pick up its signal in snatches of extinct, invented, or arcane dialect. Reddy's mastery—astonishing in its emotional depth, rhetorical facility, formal control, and lightness of touch—inheres in his marshalling of these snatches and bursts into fresh and unforgettable art.
Boston ReviewEach time Reddy destroys the current state of the poem, a new one emerges, postponing annihilation.
The American Reader
Reviews of Books by Srikanth Reddy
Underworld Lit (Aug 2020) -
Srikanth Reddy's website
Poems
- from Underworld Lit / XIII, XX (in jubilat)
- Selections from Underworld Lit/a> (in Verse)
Voyager, Book 3 / Chapter 6 (in Poetry Northwest)
- "The Twelve Hours of the Night" (on LitHub)
- "Untiled [Is is]" (on Poets.org)
- "First Circle" (on the Poetry Foundation)
- "Burial Practice" (on Poets.org)
- Four Poems (in Jacket2)
Interviews
- Knox Writers' House, with Suzanne Buffman
- Ransom Center Magazine, with Kathleen Telling
- Triple Canopy, with Lucy Ives
- NEA, with Suzanne Buffman
- Sentinel Poetry, with Amatoritsero Ede -
Video
Reading from "Underworld Lit" at the Creative Capital Retreat:
In the panel discussion "What is Poetry For" at the Poetry Foundation:
Reading with Ismail Muhammad for the Holloway Poetry Reading Series:
Reading with Sarah Riggs at The Poetry Project:
Reading "The Fundamentals of Esperanto" at the Kelly Writers' House:
