Brian Teare

Brian Teare, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. An editorial board member of Poetry Daily, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for Albion Books, his micropress.

Mentor. Workshops and classes in poetry, nonfiction, environmental writing.

Statement: As a mentor, my job is to support each writer’s individual inquiry into their art, and to inhabit as a reader the negative capability Keats wrote of so beautifully, “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I strive to supply accurate description of what’s been achieved by the work at hand, and then to ask artful questions that facilitate honest self-reflection and rewriting as re-visionary work. In counterpoint to supporting artist-led inquiry, I offer a capacious sense of literary history and creative practice, drawing traditional and experimental writing and art into conversation through a feminist, queer language politics. And I encourage each writer to gather around their work an expansive, eclectic archive of writers, thinkers, and artists whose practices inspire, challenge, and drive inquiry ever deeper, stranger, and more true to their individual vision.