I am a literary scholar and a poet. My work combines trans studies and queer studies with writing studies and literary history of 20th-21st century poetry and poetics.
I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UConn, Storrs. Before that I was the 2021-2022 N.E.H. Post-Doctoral Fellow in Poetics at The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. I received my PhD in English from The Graduate Center, CUNY in Sept 2020. I also have an MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona. My pronouns are she/her.
I have been working at the forefront of trans poetry & poetics (and queer poetry & poetics) for the past two decades. Since 2004 I have edited the journal and small press EOAGH, which focuses on innovative, trans, and queer poetry. In 2007 my first book of poems Since I Moved In won the Gil Ott Award and made an early contribution to trans poetics. From 2009-2012 I curated and hosted TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice, a talks series on queer poetics dedicated to the memory of my teacher Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, at CUNY Graduate Center. In 2013 I co-edited the first-ever published anthology of trans poetry, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books), which is currently in its third printing. In 2014 I published the first-ever article about trans poets to appear in a peer-reviewed academic journal, in the “Trans Cultural Production” issue of TSQ. In 2015, I taught the first-ever course in “Trans and Nonbinary Poetry” in an English department, at Hunter College. In 2015 I published succubus in my pocket, a posthumous book by my mentor kari edwards (an early trans woman poet), and in 2016 it won the first-ever Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. In 2017 I taught Transgender Cultural Production at Yale University. In 2019, Since I Moved In was reissued in a second edition with an Introduction by Joy Ladin. In 2022, I co-organized and co-moderated (with two other scholars) the first-ever Working Group in Trans Studies at the Modern Language Association conference. This event, titled “Trans Studies and the Transnational,” featured nine scholarly participants. And in 2024, my second full-length manuscript of poems won the Alma Book Award from Saturnalia Books, scheduled for publication in fall of 2025.
For more information about my work, see below:
EOAGH (small press / literary journal)
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Contact: tracepeterson1 [at] gmail [dot] com