Kristin Prevallet
Associate Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
M.A., University at Buffalo, 1998
prevallk@stjohns.edu
Areas of Interest
Writing, rhetoric, and multi-media composition;
Interdisciplinary studies--poetry, new media, visual art; critical
pedagogy, 20th century poetry and poetics, performance studies
As a writer, I bring together memoir, analysis, and poetic forms
in the attempt to convey multiple ways that we can make meaning in
our lives. My most recent book, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning
Time, is a meditation on my father’s death as a result of his
long battle with depression. According to Fanny Howe, in this book
essay and elegy "converge and there is left a beautiful sense of
the poetic itself as all that is left to comfort a person facing a
catastrophic loss." The poet Forrest Gander kindly wrote that "This
is the quietest and most intimate book by one of our best poets."
My most recent manuscript of poems, Dark Thinking Through
Daylight, deals with the fragmentation and disorientation that
results from the experience of trauma – and, hopefully, offers
insight into how things can be put back together.
I am also an editor of two anthologies – Third Mind:
Creative Writing Through Visual Art (Teachers and Writer’s
Collaborative) and A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry
Foundation). A Helen Adam Reader brings together ballads,
screenplays, an opera, and a short story by the underrated 20th
century poet Helen Adam. As Richard Price writes in his review of
the book in The Times Literary Supplement, “Adam heralds the
retro-futurist adoption of ballad and fairy-tale motifs now
familiar in, for example, the works of Angela Carter and Liz
Lochhead, and, in film, Tim Burton.” I worked on the book for over
10 years -- collecting Adam’s work and writing a contextual
introduction and comprehensive notes. I’m pleased that the book has
been well received both by reviewers and poetry enthusiasts. My
current editorial / critical project is to shape all of the essays
on contemporary poetry and culture that I have written over the
past 10 years into a collection, organized around the theme of
“Investigative Poetics.”
As a teacher, I want students to focus on their personal story
as the basis for a larger inquiry into the forces – social,
economic, political, moral – that shape them. I want them to apply
the skills I teach – analysis, argumentation, clarity, and passion
– to writing assignments in other classes. I am interested in
authentic writing, meaning that students who write what they think
I want them to write are missing the fundamentals of my
instruction. I see composition studies as passing down the practice
of being able to write clearly, but with personal conviction. I
want students to see the writing they do in my class as relating to
a larger audience, and their final project is shaped into a final
form of their own choosing: bound book, blog, video, mix-tape,
scrapbook. If I succeed as a teacher it is when students move
through their resistance to analysis and context, and see academic
study as relevant to the choices they are making in their daily
lives.