Toby Altman

Toby Altman is the author of two books, Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, forthcoming) and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). His poems can be found in Gulf Coast, jubilat, Lana Turner, and other journals and anthologies; his essays and reviews can or will be found in Contemporary Literature, English Literary History, and Jacket2. He recently received a 2021 Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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. He has received residencies from MacDowell, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center.

He was co-founder of What Happens, an annual festival of Poets' Theater in Iowa City, which premiered work by Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, and many others; he currently serves as co-editor of What Happens: a Magazine of Poets’ Theater.

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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. Working through figures like Bertrand Goldberg, Louis Sullivan, and Daniel Burnham, the project moves between concrete poetry, architectural criticism, geography, and memoir, to document the vulnerabilities and capacities of art under capitalism. Writing in Post45, Harris Feinsod described Discipline Park, the first book in the project, as belonging “to a genealogy of Chicago poems on the city's urban palimpsests, most famously Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca…”

Reach me at altman [dot] toby [at] gmail [dot] com.