Lytton Smith

Professor of Poetry
Welles 230
smithlj@geneseo.edu

Lytton Smith received his Ph.D. and M.F.A. from Columbia University and has been a member of the Geneseo faculty since 2014. He courses typically focus on the craft and social role of poetry, including Ecopoetics and Justice, Poetry and the Border, and 20th/21st Century Black Poetry Books.

He is the author of five published poetry collections including The Square (New Michigan Press, 2021), While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed By It (Nightboat Books, 2013) and The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat Books, 2009). In addition to publishing his own work, he has also translated twelve novels and works of nonfiction from the Icelandic. He is a 2019 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship.

 

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Photo of Lytton Smith

Classes

  • CMLT 200: Rdg Transnationally: Babel

    An introduction to the practice of Comparative Literature and introduces students to a range of key theory-and-methods debates in the field, with attention to those surrounding such matters as history, globalization, culture, and the aesthetic. Typical subtitles include: Sea Narratives, The Global Bildungsroman, Narratives of the Atlantic World, Screening "Race", Transnational Voices.

  • CMRD 101: Rdg: Climate Change&Individual

    This course requires students to read and analyze a book selected as the year’s “common reading.” Course assignments connect with other curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities and require weekly brief responses or applications of the reading.

  • ENGL 203: Rdg: Reading Transnationally

    An introduction to the discipline of English through the study of particular topics, issues, genres, or authors. Subtitles of "Reader and Text" help students develop a working vocabulary for analyzing texts and relating texts to contexts; understand the theoretical questions that inform all critical conversations about textual meaning and value; and participate competently, as writers, in the ongoing conversation about texts and theory that constitutes English as a field of study.

  • ENGL 288: Exp: Ecowriting