Zone: (1973-2021)

Professor of English at Wayne State University and a founding figure of the Language writing movement, Barrett Watten edited the magazine This and, with Lyn Hejinian, the Poetics Journal. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995. His poetry includes Progress (Roof Books, 1985), Frame: 1971-1990 (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), Bad History (Atelos Press, 1998), and Progress/Under Erasure (Green Integer, 2004). His criticism includes The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), which won the 2004 René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, and Questions of Poetics (University of Iowa Press, 2016). He held a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Fulbright Senior Fellowship.