51做厙

Dr. Angela Sorby

Angela Sorby
Dr. Angela Sorby51做厙

51做厙 Hall, 115A/210

MilwaukeeWI53201United States of America

Professor

English

My area of specialization is American poetry: reading it, interpreting it, and writing it. I am especially interested in how poetry engages with readers beyond the academy. Current projects include Chapter and Verse, for the Cambridge History of Childrens Literature; a study of Viking artifacts in nineteenth-century poetry for a volume titled From Iceland to the Americas; and a new edited collection (with Sandra Lee Kleppe) on poetry and sustainability in higher education.  

Past books include Distance Learning (New Issues/Western Michigan UP, 1998); Schoolroom Poets: Poetry, Pedagogy, and Daily Life in America (UPNE 2005, a Childrens Literature Association Honor Book); Over the River and Through the Wood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century American Childrens Poetry, co-edited with Karen Kilcup (Johns Hopkins UP 2013, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book);  Bird Skin Coat: Poems (U of Wisconsin P 2009, winner of the Brittingham Prize and the Midwest Book Award), The Sleeve Waves: Poems (U of Wisconsin P 2014, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize); and a collection co-edited with Sandra Kleppe, Poetry and Pedagogy Across the Lifespan (Palgrave 2018).

Courses Taught

  • American Literature
  • Creative Writing (Poetry)

Research Interests

  • American Poetry
  • Children's Literature
  • Creative Writing Pedagogy

Publications

Books, Editions, Collections

  • 2023    Poetry and the Global Climate Crisis: Creative Educational Approaches to Complex Challenges, co-edited with Amatoritsero Ede and Sandra Lee Kleppe.
  • 2022     Poetry and Sustainability in Education, co-edited with Sandra Lee Kleppe. Palgrave UK.   
  • 2018    Poetry and Pedagogy Across the Lifespan, co-edited with Sandra Lee Kleppe. Palgrave UK.
  • 2014    The Sleeve Waves (poems). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
  • 2013    Over the River and Through the Wood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century American Childrens Poetry, co-edited with Karen Kilcup. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • 2009    Bird Skin Coat (poems). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
  • 2005    Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917. Becoming Modern series. Hanover, NH: University of New Hampshire/University Press of New England.
  • 1998    Distance Learning (poems). Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Press/Western Michigan University.

Scholarly articles and book chapters (selected):

  • 2025 Subterranean Homesick Blues, in Chasar, Michael, ed., The Poetry of Bob Dylan:    Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs, Bloomsbury Academic.
  • 2023 "Carceral Climates: Poetry, Ecology, and the U.S. Prison System," in Ede, Kleppe, and Sorby, eds., Poetry and the Climate Crisis,  Routledge UK.  Book chapter.
  • 2020 Spectral Vikings in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, in Tim Machan and J籀n Karl Helgason, eds., Vinland on the Brain. Manchester University Press, 181-197.
  • 2020 Syllabus as Handwork, Syllabus 9:1 (2020), 1-2.
  • 2018    Baby to Baby: Lydia Sigourney and the Origins of Cuteness, in Elizabeth Petrino and Mary Louise Kete, eds. Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural  Views. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
  • 2018    The Chemistry of Poetry: Transfer Across Disciplines, with Tracy Thompson,  Sandra Kleppe and Angela Sorby, eds., Poetry and Pedagogy Across the Lifespan (London: Palgrave UK, 2018) 19-36.
  • 2017    "A Dimple in the Tomb": Cuteness in Emily Dickinson." ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 63: 2 (2017) 297-328.
  • 2017    Conjuring Readers: Antebellum African-American Childrens Poetry, a chapter in Anna Mae Duane and Kate Capshaw Smith, eds., Who Writes for Black Children? African-American Childrens Literature Before 1900. University of Minnesota Press.
  • 2016    Women Poets, Child Readers, in Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides, eds., A History of American Womens Poetry. Cambridge University Press.
  • 2016    Childrens Culture, in Gary Burns, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Popular Culture. New York: Blackwell.
  • 2015    At Home in the Strangers House: Poetic Revision and Spiritual Practice, in Anne M. Pasero and John Pustejovsky, And have you changed your life? The Challenge of Listening to the Spiritual in Contemporary Poetry. 51做厙 Press.  
  • 2014    Disciplined Play:  Childrens Poetry to 1920, a chapter in Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt, eds., The Cambridge History of American Poetry. Cambridge University Press.
  • 2013    Education, in Eliza Richards, ed., Emily Dickinson In Context. Cambridge University Press, 36-45.
  • 2013    Pretty New Moons: Contact Zones in Nineteenth-Century American Childrens Poetry, with Karen Kilcup. Introduction to Over the River and Through the Wood. Johns Hopkins UP.
  • 2012    Recitation and Fireside Poets, entries in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton UP, 2012.
  • 2011    Who Wrote Rock Me to Sleep?: Elizabeth Akers Allen and the Profession of Poetry in MLQ: A Journal of Literary History.
  • 2011    The Poetics of Bird-Defense, 1860-1918 in Mike Chasar and Heidi Bean, eds., Poetry After Cultural Studies. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
  • 2011    The Golden Age, in Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, eds., Keywords for Childrens  Literature, NY: New York University Press, 96-99.
  • 2010    Animal Poems and Children's Rights in America, 1820-1890, in Morag Styles, et. al., eds., Poetry and Childhood.  Stoke-on-Kent, UK: Trentham Books.
  • 2010    Longfellows Ghost: Writing Popular Poetry, in Blas Falconer, ed., Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
  • 2009    The Milwaukee School of Fleshly Poetry:  Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Popular Aestheticism, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.
  • 2008    Raymond Carvers Poetry and the Temperance Tradition, Raymond Carver Review.
  • 2007    Symmetrical Womanhood:  Poetry in the Womans Building Library, Libraries and Culture.
  • 2007    "Approaches to Teaching the Schoolroom Poets," in Paula Bennett and Karen Kilcup,  Approaches to Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry. NY: Modern Language Association Press.
  • 1999    Performing Class:  James Whitcomb Rileys Poetry of Distinction, MLQ: A Journal of Literary History.
  • 1998    St. Nicholas Magazine and the Poetics of Peer Culture, 1872-1900, American Studies.

Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction Publications (selected)

  • 2025 Heat Dome, Cortland Review 93. Poetry.
  • 2024 The Healer,Contemporary Verse 2 (Spring 2024) 56. Poetry.
  • 2024  Find a Penny, Pick It Up, Southern Humanities Review 57:2 (Summer 2024) 37-38. Poetry.
  • 2023 Our Bodies Ourselves, Plume, vol. 146.  Poetry.
  • 2023 The Heist, Reading Trouble, The Amp, and Apocrypha, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, October 2023.  Poetry.
  • 2023 AMC Seating Tiers Explained, The Belladonna, February 2023.  Creative nonfiction.
  • 2022 Midden, Third Coast 52, 113-14. Poetry.
  • 2022 Cadmium Red, Calyx 33: 2, 90-91 Poetry..
  • 2022 First Apiary,  Terrain: Place, Climate, Justice. Poetry.
  • 2021 The Family, Dash, Some Drew Horses, Prairie Schooner 95:1. Poetry.
  • 2021  Hope is Feathers Spreading, in B.J. Hollars, ed. Hope is the Thing (Wisconsin  Historical Society Press), Poetry.
  • 2020   Bird Tree, Take It All Off, Fiddlehead: Atlantic Canadas International Literary Journal.  Poetry.
  • 2020     Orchard, Westerly 64:2. Poetry.
  • 2019    "Big Rig," in New Ohio Review 25. Poetry 
  • 2018    Limn, in Feminist Studies. Poetry.
  • 2017    The Boring Side of the Family, in Tina Schumann, ed., Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents.  Los Angeles: Red Hen P. Poetry.
  • 2017    Exercise, Poetry Northwest. Poetry.
  • 2017    No One Knows Where the Ladder Goes, The First Line. Fiction. Finalist, Best Small Fictions 2017.
  • 2016    Code Violations: Chicago Review in the 1990s, in Chicago Review.  Creative nonfiction.
  • 2014    Stranger Danger, Journal of the West 53 (4): 56-59.  Creative nonfiction.
  • 2014    Memo from the Center for Teaching and Learning, The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Creative nonfiction.
  • 2013    Paradise, Wisconsin, Barrow Street.  Poetry.
  • 2013    Sivka-Burka, Interstate, A is for Air, Notes from a Northern State,  Prairie Schooner Poetry.
  • 2013    "A Walk Across the Ice," "Golden Spike," "Ink. Mesa, AZ: Superstition Review, 2013. Poetry.
  • 2012    Fallout, Wide Boulevard, Tiny Apartment, Zone 3. Poetry.
  • 2012    Stopping At the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area On a Snowy Evening, North American Review. Poetry.
  • 2011    Creating a Cone of Silence in China, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Creative nonfiction.
  • 2011    Snapshots of a Semester in China, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 2011. Creative nonfiction.
  • 2011    Thrifting, Massachusetts Review. Poetry.  
  • 2011    Pengyou, read by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Weekend All Things Considered (NPR), April 2011.  Fiction.
  • 2010    Spill, Poets for Living Waters. Poetry.
  • 2009    Looking Backward: 2020, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1, 2009.  Creative nonfiction.
  • 2009    The Suburban Mysteries, Jacket 38.
  • 2009    Letter to Hugo from the Land of the Living, Babel Fruit. Poetry.
  • 2009    Flyover State, Shepherd Express. Reprint.
  • 2008    Six Degrees of Separation, Willow Springs. Poetry.
  • 2008    Nostalgia for the Present, Two Toyotas Crash, and Breathing Out Smoke, Southern Review. Poetry.
  • 2004    Empire Builder in John Burnside, ed. Wild Reckoning:  An Anthology Provoked by Rachel Carsons Silent Spring. Gulbenkian Foundation (UK), 2004. Reprint. Poetry.
  • 2004    Catch and Release, Pinyon (2004): 18. Special issue on Norwegian poetry; in English, and translated into Norwegian (as Slip og Fang) by Sandra Lee Kleppe. Poetry.
  • 2003    Glossolalia in Diane Boller, et. al., eds.  Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the Worlds Most Popular Website.  Sourcebooks, 2003. Reprint; also appeared on the Poetry Daily website. Poetry.
  • 2001    Really Barely There, Born: Art and Literature Collaboration (2001): n.p.  Art by Karen Ingram.
  • 2000    Insomnia and The Attic of the Attic, Portland Review. Poetry.
  • 2000    Land of Lincoln and The Man Without a Middle, in America Poetry: The Next Generation. Jim Daniels and Gerald Constanzo, eds., Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2000.  Reprint. Poetry.
  • 1998    Land of Lincoln, Really Barely There, and Kate Fox, Third Coast. Poetry.
  • 1996    Weather at Ten, North American Review.  Poetry.
  • 1995    Museum Piece, in Richard Howard, ed., Best American Poetry 1995, Simon & Schuster, 1995. Reprint. Poetry.
  • 1994    Museum Piece, The Nation. Poetry.

Reviews and Review Essays:

  • 2019   Review of Patricia Crane, Reading Children: LIteracy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America in American Literary History Review Series XX.
  • 2017    Review of Denise Duhamel, Scald, in Chicago Review 60:4 (2017), 3 pp.
  • 2016    Review of Donelle Ruwe, British Children's Poetry in the Romantic Era: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme in Children's Literature Association Quarterly  40: 1 (Winter 2016), 420-422.
  • 2015    Review of Claudia Stokes, The Altar at Home:  Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion. Modern Philology 113, 2 (November 2015): E112-E114
  • 2015    Review of Mary Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. MLQ 76: 1 (March 2015): 212-214.
  • 2014    Roundtable review (with Monika Elbert) of Anna Mae Duane, Suffering Childhood: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim.  Journal of American Studies 48:1(February 2014): 1-9.
  • 2010    It's (Not) All Small Stuff: The Lion and the Unicorn Award for Childrens Poetry, with Michael Heyman and Joseph T. Thomas, in The Lion and the Unicorn 34 (September 2010): 354-363.
  • 2009    Lively Rigor:  the 2009 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Childrens Poetry, with Michael Heyman and Joseph T. Thomas, in The Lion and the Unicorn 33: 3 (September 2009): 376-396.
  • 2008    Review of Joseph T. Thomas, Poetrys Playground, in Childrens Literature 36: (2008): 245-247.
  • 2008    from the brain all the way to the heart: the 2008 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Childrens Poetry, with Richard Flynn and Joseph T. Thomas, in The Lion and the Unicorn 32: 3 (September 2008): 344-356.
  • 2008    Featured essay review of Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves, American Historical Review 113 (April 2008): 449-451.
  • 2007    Message in a Bottle:  the 2007 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Childrens Poetry, with Richard Flynn and Joseph T. Thomas, The Lion and the Unicorn 31 (2007): 264-281.
  • 2007    Review of Christopher Irmscher, Longfellow Redux, in New England Quarterly, 80:1 (March 2007): 40-41.
  • 2006    Review of Joel Scott and Matthew Pace, eds., Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, in European Romantic Review 11:4 (2006): 502-507.
  • 2004    Review of James Guthrie, Above Time:  Emersons and Thoreaus  Temporal Revolutions, in M/MLA Journal 37:1 (Spring 2004): 117-118.
  • 2001    Review of J.D. McClatchy, Twenty Questions:  Posed by Poems, in M/MLA Journal  34: 3 (Autumn, 2001): 89-91
  • 1999    Review of Elizabeth Arnold, The Reef,  in Chicago Review 49: 2 (1999): 137-139.
  • 1996    Review of Lynne Crosbie, VillainElle, in Chicago Review, 42:2 (1996): 117-119.
  • 1996    Review of Fatima Lim-Wilson, Crossing the Snow Bridge, in Chicago Review,42:1 (1996): 88-89.
  • 1995    Review of Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank:  Meyer  Levin and the Diary, in Chicago Review 41:4 (1995): 142-144.
  • 1995    Review of Natasha Saj矇, Red Under the Skin, in Chicago Review 41:1 (1995): 97-98.

Honors and Awards

  • Won Outstanding Achievement in Poetry award (for The Sleeve Waves), Wisconsin Library Association, 2015
  • Won the 2013 Felix Pollak book prize for poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Book forthcoming March 2014.
  • NEH grant (in collaboration with Sarah Wadsworth) from the American Library Association for an outreach project titled Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. 2011.
  • Brittingham Prize for poetry manuscript Bird Skin Coat, 2008.
  • Honor Book Prize, Childrens Literature Association, 2007
  • Summer Faculty Fellowship, 51做厙, 2006.
  • Schlesinger Library Fellowship, Harvard University, 2005.
  • Vivian Pollak Scholar-in-Amherst Award, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2003
  • Urban Studies Institute Course Development Grant, 51做厙,2003.
  • Summer Faculty Fellowship, 51做厙, 2002.
  • Korzenik Fellowship, Longfellow Friends, 2002.
  • 51做厙 PT-3 Grant, 2001.
  • Linfield College Faculty Fellowship, 1998.
  • Stuart Tave Fellowship, University of Chicago, 1996.
  • Discovery/The Nation (writing) Prize, The Nation and the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, 1994.
  • Brauer Grant, Educating Emily Dickinson, University of Chicago, 1994.
  • John Fiske Poetry (writing) Prize, University of Chicago, 1993.

Additional Information

Office Hours

Spring 2026

  • Monday 3:30PM - 5:00PM (in-person)
  • Wednesday 12:30PM - 2:00PM (virtual)

Teaching Schedule

Spring 2026

  • ENGL 4260-101:  Creative Writing: Poetry
    • Monday and Wednesday 2:00PM-3:15PM
  • ENGL 4954-701:  Seminar in Creative Writing - Advanced Writing Workshop 
    • Monday 5:00PM-7:30PM
  • ENGL 4986-102:  Writing Internship
    • TBA
  • ENGL 4988-101:  Practicum in Literature and Language Arts
    • MoWeFr 9:00AM-9:50AM
  • ENGL 5988-101:  Practicum in Literature and Language Arts
    • MoWeFr 9:00AM-9:50AM

CONTACT

Department of English
51做厙 Hall, 115
1217 W. Wisconsin Ave.
Milwaukee, WI 53233
(414) 288-7179

Contact Us

ENGLISH ON SOCIAL MEDIA

  


PROBLEM WITH THIS WEBPAGE?

Report an accessibility problem

To report another problem, please contact kirsten.boeh@marquette.edu