Amaranth Borsuk’s work focuses on textual materiality—from the surface of the page to the surface of language.
Her most recent book is The Book (MIT Press, 2018), a brief introduction to the book as object, content, idea, and interface published in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. Her books of poetry include Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016), Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), selected by Paul Hoover for the 2011 Slope Editions Poetry Prize; and Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), a chapbook-length erasure. Abra (1913 Press, 2016), a book of mutating poems created with Kate Durbin, received an NEA-sponsored Expanded Artists’ Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago and was released as a limited-edition book with a free iPad / iPhone app created by Ian Hatcher. The collaboration As We Know (Subito Press, 2014), selected by Julie Carr for the Subito Prize, reshapes 60 entries from Andy Fitch’s summer diary into a collective confessional/constructivist collage that foregrounds the tensions of authorship.
Collaboration and materiality are central to Borsuk’s practice. Together with Brad Bouse, she created Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012; Springgun Press, 2016), a book of augmented-reality poetry. It has been featured on Salon.com, BrainPickings, Wired, and other media sites and has been exhibited widely. Through a grant from CT@Work and SiteProjects, Inc., Borsuk and Bouse completed Whispering Galleries (2014), a site-specific interactive text work for the New Haven Free Public Libraries that uses the Leap gestural controller to invite visitors to brush the dust from a historic diary, revealing poems hidden within it. Borsuk’s other digital collaborations include Wave Signs, an immersive sound installation with Carrie Bodle; and The Deletionist, an erasure bookmarklet created with Nick Montfort and Jesper Juul.
Borsuk is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, where she also serves as Associate Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics. She and her colleagues run a lively series of events and readings throughout the year that bring innovative writers and artists to campus. In 2019, they hosted the bi-annual &Now Festival of Innovative Writing with the theme “Points of Convergence.” From 2013-2017, she was part of the cross-disciplinary research group Affect and Audience in the Digital Age, which hosted symposia and speakers on the Seattle and Bothell campuses of UW through the generous support of the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Before coming to Bothell, she served as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies and Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she taught workshops and courses related to poetry’s changing media forms from modernism to the present.
She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where her work focused on the use of writing technologies by modern and contemporary poets to change their relationship to the page and their construction of authorship. While at USC, she co-founded The Loudest Voice (click here for the series’ latest incarnation) with Bryan Hurt. Together with Hurt and Genevieve Kaplan, in 2010 she co-edited The Loudest Voice: Volume 1 (Figueroa Press), an anthology of work by readers from the first four years of the series. She also co-founded the Gold Line Press chapbook series with Kaplan, which publishes chapbooks of fiction and poetry in alternating years through an annual contest.
Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Writing Technologies, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Slope, and Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion. Poems have recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Seattle Review of Books, Viz: Inter-Arts, Bombay Gin, Bat City Review, Berfrois, and Chicago Review, among other journals.
Click here for a complete CV.
aborsuk / uw / edu