Henk Rossouw
Jean Jacques-Aurore Labbé Fournet Associate Professor and Co-director of Creative Writing
MFA, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2011
PhD, University of Houston, 2017
Office: Griffin 333
Phone: 337-482-6913
E-mail: henk.rossouw@louisiana.edu
Pronouns: he/him
Teaching and Research Areas
Creative writing, modern and contemporary poetry, documentary poetics, ecopoetics.
Recent Courses Taught
ENGL 319: Modern and Contemporary Poetry
ENGL 410: Poetry Workshop
ENGL 580: Advanced Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry
ENGL 680: Special Topics in Advanced Poetics: Ecopoetics
Noteworthy
Henk Rossouw's debut Xamissa (Fordham University Press, 2018) won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor's Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in the 2018 box set New-Generation African Poets. Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press) featured his work. His poems have been in POETRY, Lana Turner Journal, Poetry Northwest, World Literature Today, Boston Review, and The Paris Review. In 2024, he was a Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence. He's an editor for Tupelo Quarterly and a consulting editor for the African Poetry Book Series at the University of Nebraska Press. Henk is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he co-directs the Creative Writing Program.
Teaching Award
Outstanding Doctoral Student Mentor Award, College of Liberal Arts, 2022-2023
Selected Publications
Books:
Xamissa. Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize, Fordham University Press, 2018.
www.fordhampress.com/9780823281107/xamissa
Poems:
“Elevated Flare.” Gulf Coast, vol. 36, no. 1., 2023,
gulfcoastmag.org/online/36.1-summer/fall-2023/elevated-flare/
“Passerine.” POETRY, Sep. 2022, pp. 428-429,
www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158384/passerine
“Sonnet for My Son.” Boston Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2014, p. 74,
bostonreview.net/poetry/henk-rossouw-sonnet-my-son
“The Dream of The Road.” Paris Review, no. 205, 2013, pp. 237-238,
www.theparisreview.org/poetry/6245/the-dream-of-the-road-henk-rossouw
Reviews of his work
Kempf, Christopher. “Review of Xamissa, by Henk Rossouw.” Colorado Review, 30 Apr. 2019, coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/xamissa/
Darling, Kristina Marie. “‘Spare This Body, Set Fire to Another’: Speech and Silence in Work by Kaveh Akbar, Brenna Womer, and Henk Rossouw.” Kenyon Review, 7 Nov. 2018 kenyonreview.org/2018/11/spare-this-body-set-fire-to-another-speech-silence-in-work-by-kaveh-akbar-brenna-womer-henk-rossouw/
For more on his work, visit henkrossouw.com