Dr. Steven P. Schneider

PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS-PAN AMERICAN

My teaching and research have focused on twentieth-century American poetry and culture. I’m particularly interested in the ways American poets have responded to American culture. My first book, A.R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), grew out of my interest in the impact of science and contemporary vision theory on human nature. It is a comprehensive study of Ammons’s poetry and the influences of biology, physics, astronomy and other sciences on his work. My second book is a collection of essays that I edited, Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A.R. Ammons’s Long Poems (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999) and includes essays by Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, and other prominent critics.

In addition to my work on Ammons, I have written extensively on a variety of contemporary poets who represent diverse ethnic groups in the United States, including Rita Dove, Gary Soto, and Marge Piercy. My own poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Critical Quarterly, The Nebraska Review, Shofar, The Literary Review, and many other journals. I am currently working on a collaborative project with my artist-wife Reefka, entitled “Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives,” a series of figurative drawings and poems about people living and working along the U.S.-Mexico border.

For the past five years I have served as Chair of the Department of English at the University of Texas-Pan American. I have had the pleasure of working with a talented and diverse faculty in building academic programs for the largely Mexican-American student population in South Texas. Our department has hosted readings by prominent writers like Ted Kooser, Marjorie Agosin, Gary Soto, and Kathleen Alcala. Under my direction, we have sponsored an annual Summer Creative Writing Institute for both undergraduate and graduate students as well public school teachers. My work at UT-PA has inspired me to explore issues of identity, immigration, and cultural relevancy in my research and teaching.

I teach courses on contemporary American poetry, multiethnic literatures of the United States, and creative writing.

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