John Keene

John Keene is a widely celebrated and award-winning multigenre author whose research interests include creative writing (fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, hybrid-genre), literary and cultural criticism (in 20th-century African American and African Diasporic literature and cultural studies, comparative literary studies, and aesthetics), and translation studies and practice (with translations of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from French, Portuguese, and Spanish). His major works include the novel Annotations (New Directions, 1995) and the short fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), which received the inaugural 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses (in the United Kingdom), a 2016 American Book Award, and a 2016 Lannan Literary Award. A longtime member of the Dark Room Writers Collective of Cambridge and Boston and a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, Keene has also taught at Brown University and at Northwestern University, where he served as director of the undergraduate Creative Writing Program and acting codirector of the M.A./M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program. In May 2017, he was awarded the Rutgers Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award, given across all Rutgers' campuses since 2000 to "honor tenured professors who make exceptional connections between their academic research and their teaching." He was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in October 2018.

Keene's other published works include GRIND (ITI Press, 2016), an art-text collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, and the poetry chapbook Playland (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016). He is the 2003 recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2005 Whiting Foundation Award in Fiction and Poetry, and a 2008 Fellowship for Distinguished First Poetry Collection from the inaugural Pan-African Literary Forum. Since 2002, Keene has been engaged in a durational and collaborative conceptual art project entitled "The Emotional Outreach Project" (Field Study Research Group A) in Chicago, Jersey City, and New York City. The newest versions of this project, the Emotional Exercises (6.0), were first exhibited at This Red Door in Brooklyn in January and February 2014. Keene joins the ISGRJ with the intent of contributing to the institute’s vision at the local and global levels and participating in its mentorship and intellectual communities.