Michael Snediker
Dr. Michael D. Snediker
Poet and Queer Theorist
with Dr. Tyler Bradway,
Assistant Professor of English
On April 21st 2015, Dr. Michael D. Snediker (University of Houston) gave a reading from his Lambda-Nominated poetry collection, The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum, 2013) and his forthcoming work, The New York Editions, which translates Henry James's novels into lyric poems.
Dr. Snediker’s poems have been published in journals such as The Cortland Review, The Paris Review, Black Warrior Review, and Pleiades.
Dr. Snediker also gave a lecture entitled “Weaver’s Handshake, Grave Rubbing: Sedgwick and Chronicity,” drawn from his next book, Contingent Figure: Aesthetic Duress from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (under contract, University of Minnesota Press). The book reads disability theory and aesthetics across the long American nineteenth century.
Dr. Snediker’s previous book is the acclaimed Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). In this book, Snediker recovers positive affect for queer theory through readings of poets such as Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jack Spicer. Queer Optimism was nominated for the MLA First Book Prize, the Alan Bray Prize, and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Prize.
Below is Dr. Snediker’s lecture in three parts: