Poetry and the City

Donna Stonecipher is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia, listed as a best book of 2023 by NPR, and Transaction Histories, cited by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). She is translating Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Forthcoming in 2027 is a narrated nonfiction book on Berlin and architectural ornament entitled The Secret Life and Death of Ornament in Berlin (MIT Press). 

photo credit ©John Nijenhuis

Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Brian David Crawford is a poet and educator based in Berlin. He studied literature at Brandeis University and the University of California at Irvine, and has taught literature and writing in the United States and Germany. He is currently Guest Professor at the Georg August Universität in Göttingen. His poetry has received support from the Seamus Heaney Poetry Summer School in Belfast; his poems are forthcoming in Gulf Coast and The New Ohio Review, and have appeared in The New American Studies Journal. He is guest editor of this special issue of the New American Studies Journal on North American poets in Berlin.