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Henk Rossouw

Associate Professor of Creative Writing
Co-Director of Creative Writing Program

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 326: Creative Writing II: Poetry
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