Ronaldo Wilson

Visiting Assistant Professor in English

Specialtization
20th Century African American Poetry & Poetics, African American Literature, Creative Writing, The Black Body in 20th Century and Contemporary Visual Culture.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall 2008 and Poems of the Black Object, to be published in the Futurepoem Books annual series in Spring 2009. 

He has held fellowships at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Yaddo Corporation and has had four poems nominated for a Pushcart Prize.   

A National Research Council Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, he is currently completing his thesis, Black Bodies Black Field(s): 20th Century and Contemporary Poetics of the Black Body in African American Poetry and Visual Culture.  In this project, he focuses on how the black body is presented, mined, re-inscribed, broken apart and, ultimately, re-presented as an attempt to map out a poetics of its recovery by looking at the writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Harryette Mullen, and Renee Gladman and the contemporary visual artists Ellen Gallagher, Kara Walker and William Pope.L.  

He has shared his work at the University of Iowa, California College of Arts and Crafts, University of Pittsburgh, James Madison University, University of Illinois, Chicago, Cooper Union School, The CUNY Graduate Center, Poet’s House, Studio Museum of Harlem, New Langton Arts, and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

His teaching interests include 20th Century and Contemporary African American Literature, Creative Writing, Contemporary American Poetry and Poetics, Black Visual Culture, and the work of recent experimental writers and artists such as John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Tisa Bryant, and the Black Took Collective. His courses explore the interplay between race and sexuality, language, art, and the critical and creative strategies where these intersections are drawn.   
             
Selected Publications:

“The Accident,” “The Black Object’s Deportment,” and “The Black Object’s Catalyst,” The Encyclopedia Project, Vol. 1. A-E, Summer 2006, 9, 131,193.

“Incident and Episode in the Red House,” “The Brown Boy’s Flesh,” “The Brown Boy’s Final Killing,” and “The Brown Boy’s Silence,” Gulf Coast, Vol.18, N2, Spring 2006, 132-137. 
 
“On the C Train the Black Object Ponders Amuzati’s Family Eaten in the Congo,” “The Brown Boy is Looking and Listening,” “The Brown Boy Loves the White Man,” Callaloo, Vol. 27, N4, Fall 2004, 1042-1046. 
 
“Vergelioian Space V: Caliban X,” and “Vergelioian Space VI: Open Letter to Faith Ringgold and Michele Wallace,” Nocturnes 2 (Re)view of the Literary Arts, Fall 2002., 137-142.

“Ellen Gallagher: Read Slippage,” Provincetown Arts, 2000 (Annual Issue),  Vol. 15: 146-147.