Michael Martin Shea

Assistant Professor of English

Education

PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2024
MA, University of Pennsylvania, 2021
MFA, University of Mississippi, 2014
BA, Florida State University, 2011

Office: Griffin 253
Email: michael.shea@louisiana.edu
Pronouns: he/him

Teaching and Research Areas:

Poetry and poetics, hemispheric American literature, comparative literary studies, post-45 literature and culture, Latin American and Latinx literature, postcolonial and world literature, critical theory, theory and practice of translation.

Noteworthy:

Michael Martin Shea is a poet, translator, and scholar. His research centers on the relationship between hemispheric American poetry and the economic and material histories of the 20th and 21st centuries. His current project, “Neoliberal Visions: Poetry, Mysticism, and Crisis in the Americas,” examines the figure of the visionary poet across the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean. He is also at work on a second project, “Spaces of Mistranslation,” which re-theorizes the relationship between translation, space, and place through the history of experimental writing and its movement across and through various borders and borderland regions. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature, Cultural Dynamics, and English Literary History. Brief essays and reviews have appeared in ASAP/Review, Harvard Review, Modern Language Notes, and elsewhere. He is also the co-editor, with Claire Farley, of a special issue of College Literature on “Infrastructural Poetics.”

He is the author of the poetry collection The Immanent Fields (New Mundo Press, 2026), as well as numerous chapbooks of poetry, including I’m Sorry But None of This Is My Fault (Essay Press, 2025) and To Hell With Good Intentions (Beautiful Days Press, 2024). He also translates modern and contemporary poetry from Latin America. His translation of the Argentine poet Liliana Ponce’s Theory of the Voice and Dream (World Poetry Books, 2025) won the 2026 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His poems and translations have appeared widely, including in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, New England Review, and Poetry. From 2015 to 2020, he served on the core editorial team for the Best American Experimental Writing anthology series, published by Wesleyan University Press.

For more, please visit: www.michaelmartinshea.com