Michael Dowdy

I teach courses on Latinx literatures and cultures. These courses focus on the social, political, and literary movements of the 1960s; the cultural politics of migration, citizenship, and bordering; and representations of labor, resistance, and belonging. 

As a scholar, I have published three books. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press, 2013) was the first book-length study of contemporary Latinx poetry and the first to put U.S. Latinx poets in conversation with poets in Latin America. With the poet Claudia Rankine, I coedited the critical anthology of contemporary U.S. poets, Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). My articles and essays on poetry, poetics, and Latinx literature have appeared in American Poetry Review, Aztlán, Callaloo, College Literature, Hispanic Review, MELUS, Poetry, and The Writer’s Chronicle (AWP), among other journals, and in edited volumes published the University of Arizona Press, Cambridge University Press, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and the University of Michigan Press.   

As a poet, I have published a book and a chapbook. My collection Urbilly won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (2017), and my poems have been anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology (Vol. IX, Virginia), published by Texas Review Press (2022), and in The Ecopoetry Anthology (Vol. II), published by Trinity University Press (forthcoming, 2025). My poems have appeared in Appalachian Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Miracle Monocle, Pembroke Magazine, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among other journals and magazines. 

As a writer of creative nonfiction, I have published personal and lyric essays in a range of print and online venues. My book Tell Me About Your Bad Guys: Fathering in Anxious Times, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2025.