Elma Stuckey Liberal Arts & Sciences Emerging Poet-in-Residence

Each year, the English Department welcomes the Elma Stuckey Liberal Arts & Sciences Emerging Poet-in-Residence, a poet from an underrepresented community and/or one who brings diverse cultural, ethnic, theoretical, and national perspectives to his or her writing and teaching.  The Stuckey Poet-in-Residence teaches one course per semester (an undergraduate workshop, craft seminar, or literature course), gives a public reading, and sometimes supervises a small number of graduate theses.

2008-2009 Elma Stuckey Poet-in-Residence: Sandra Lim

SANDRA LIM’s first book, Loveliest Grotesque, was published in 2006 by Kore Press. Her poetry has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Soul Mountain Fellowship, and a 2006 Pushcart Prize nomination. Lim earned her BA at Stanford University, a PhD at UC Berkeley, and her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught at UC Berkeley, the University of Iowa, and Saint Mary’s College of California.

About Elma Stuckey

The position is named for Elma Stuckey, a poet born in Memphis who lived in Chicago for more than 40 years.  Author of The Big Gate (1976) and The Collected Poems of Elma Stuckey (1987), she has been described as “the A.E. Housman of slavery”—a poet who recast for contemporary readers “those things that were kept from the ears of the unknowing slavemasters.”