Divya Victor
BIOGRAPHY
Divya Victor’s writing, editing, and research focuses on twentieth, twenty-first century, and emergent poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on innovative and experimental forms and poets who undertake representations of trauma, both systemic and intersubjective.
She is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Writing at Michigan State University. Her poetry and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, German, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed and installed at/for Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She is currently at work on an artist’s book project commissioned by the Press at Colorado College.
She is the author of Kith (Fence Books/Book Thug, 2017). The cross-genre book explores national, racial, and linguistic difference in the United States, Singapore, India, and other sites of the Indian diaspora. Written as a hybrid book which operates across genres—poetry, lyric essay, and prose memoir—Kith engages themes of migration, communal mythology, collective notions of “destiny,” and native identity to examine the resistant potential of feminized bodies facing assimilative pressures.
She is also the author of several other books of poetry, chapbooks, and articles. She has been a featured critic for The Poetry Foundation. She is the continuing Guest Editor for Jacket2 (University of Pennsylvania), where she has curated features on Conceptual Writing (Plural and Global)and Extremity(As Form and Theme). She has been a long-standing commentator and critic for Jacket2, producing extended series of interviews with significant feminist poets (Discourses on Vocality) and poets writing in the expanded and transnational Anglophone context (Discourses on Locality). She is the developmental editor of several books of poetry from contemporary innovative presses, including BookThug (Toronto), Invisible Publishing (Toronto), and Ethos Books (Singapore).She is on the Advisory board of Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing and on the Editorial Board of Les Figues Press.
Author Photo and Biography © Divya Victor. All rights reserved.
