About
One reads him with breath held in admiration, then gasping from it.
—Mary Kinzie
Toby Altman is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023) and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has held fellowships from the Graham Foundation, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Beloit College.
He holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from Northwestern University, where his dissertation "The Shock of the Old: Periodization, Poetics, and Diachronic Exchange between the Renaissance and the Avant-Garde," received the Jean H. Hagstrum Prize for Best Dissertation. His criticism has been widely published, including articles and essays in Contemporary Literature, English Literary History, The Georgia Review, and Jacket2.
In front of Bertrand Goldberg’s Good Samaritan Hospital (1978) in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Emily Barton Altman.
Discipline Park traces…a distributed wound—a long, rough scrape that hurts in the foreground, sensitizes the border between self and world, and tests the integrity of surface itself.
—Anna Moschovakis
I am currently completing a monograph, The Diachronic Renaissance: Periodization, Poetics, and the Shock of the Old, about the strange, subterranean connections between Renaissance and avant-garde poetries. I am also working on a trilogy of poetic meditations on the politics of American architecture in the mid-west. Engaging the architects Bertrand Goldberg, Louis Sullivan, and John Wellborn Root, the three books move between concrete poetry, architectural criticism, geography, and memoir, to document the vulnerabilities and capacities of art under capitalism.
It is a fascinating subject when handled so skillfully and with such profound understanding of how we are shaped by the places built to administer care when we are most vulnerable.
—DA Powell
I live in Madison, Wisconsin, with my wife, Emily Barton Altman. But I’m a Chicago guy at heart. Shoot me an email. You can reach me at altman [dot] toby [at] gmail [dot] com.