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 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 on 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. And 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.

For more information about my work, see below:

Scholarly Publications

Awards & Fellowships

Teaching

Events & Lectures

Poetry

Video

EOAGH (small press / literary journal)

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Contact: tracepeterson1 [at] gmail [dot] com

Academia.edu

Academy of American Poets

EPC at Univ of Buffalo

Google Scholar

Out @ UConn

Pennsound

Poetry Foundation

Poets & Writers

YouTube