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Keegan Cook Finberg

@keegancf

because my little dog knows me. writer. scholar. professor. recently finished a book about poetic form and the US welfare state: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-in-general/9780231219228/

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03.09.2023
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Latest posts by Keegan Cook Finberg @keegancf

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Doing a mini east coast book tour, starting this Friday:

Montreal: Friday 2/27 at Librairie l’Euguélionne with @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social (6pm)

Brooklyn: Monday 3/2 at The Word is Change with @downevent.bsky.social (6pm)

Baltimore: Tuesday 3/3 at Red Emma’s with @keegancf.bsky.social (7pm)

25.02.2026 17:24 👍 7 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0
The cover of Baltimore Beat. It is designed to look like a zine, with places to fold it and collaged images on it. Yellow text reads “Baltimore Beat” and “The Literary Issue.”

The cover of Baltimore Beat. It is designed to look like a zine, with places to fold it and collaged images on it. Yellow text reads “Baltimore Beat” and “The Literary Issue.”

Issue 78 of Baltimore Beat is live! It’s our literary issue! Our zine-inspired cover was designed by nat raum.

25.02.2026 14:40 👍 43 🔁 16 💬 1 📌 0

I love this!!

25.02.2026 13:45 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I am headed to Nashville tomorrow for a book talk and workshop at Vanderbilt. I spent two years with this department after I finished my Phd and before I truly conceived of what I was doing as writing a book. It feels so special to come back now! as.vanderbilt.edu/english/robe...

25.02.2026 13:44 👍 11 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

please CC me on that email

20.02.2026 17:48 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

a true gem! As someone thrilled about this book but also psyched about your next project, very apropos: "As we go on, we remember/ all the times we had together/ As our lives change, come whatever..."

20.02.2026 17:45 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Senior skip day coming up?!

20.02.2026 17:34 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Poster for talk at Vanderbilt on Friday, Feb 27th at 2pm. Talk is by Keegan Cook Finberg and entitled "Reproduction and Generality: Feminist Diets in Poetry by Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, and Eleanor Antin." There is a headshot of Keegan and a picture of her book, Poetry in Genera: How a Literary Form Became Public.

Poster for talk at Vanderbilt on Friday, Feb 27th at 2pm. Talk is by Keegan Cook Finberg and entitled "Reproduction and Generality: Feminist Diets in Poetry by Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, and Eleanor Antin." There is a headshot of Keegan and a picture of her book, Poetry in Genera: How a Literary Form Became Public.

I am thrilled to be giving a public lecture for the Vanderbilt English Department next week. If you are in Nashville, come hear me talk about social reproduction, diets, and poetry.

20.02.2026 14:58 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1

My new article in @nybooks.com on Authoritarianism from Below.

15.02.2026 14:00 👍 41 🔁 10 💬 1 📌 0
Child, young toddler, and adult standing at window watching snow removal

Child, young toddler, and adult standing at window watching snow removal

Our fam loves Baltimore city snow removal! ❤️DPW

07.02.2026 16:12 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

And from Grogan’s STITCH, UNSTITCH !

07.02.2026 16:00 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

This is from Myers’s WORKS AND DAYS (!)

07.02.2026 16:00 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Poetry, meanwhile, is invisible, contemplative, and unproductive. Against barbarism and nuclear devastation there is poetry, small and still, illegible to the folk yet indebted to them, flowing from their habits and speech yet utterly separate. If the speaker fails to do gender on capital's terms—work, church, bowling—she also clears a protected space for alternative ways of being, unproductivity, and creation to flourish in the dark, and she names that space: poetry. (From Kristin Grogan’s STITCH, UNSTITCH

Poetry, meanwhile, is invisible, contemplative, and unproductive. Against barbarism and nuclear devastation there is poetry, small and still, illegible to the folk yet indebted to them, flowing from their habits and speech yet utterly separate. If the speaker fails to do gender on capital's terms—work, church, bowling—she also clears a protected space for alternative ways of being, unproductivity, and creation to flourish in the dark, and she names that space: poetry. (From Kristin Grogan’s STITCH, UNSTITCH

Also! Tonight:

07.02.2026 15:53 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 1

Oh so good!

07.02.2026 15:46 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

tonight 🌈

07.02.2026 14:36 👍 4 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

This is a wonderful read about (among other timely topics) the interaction of autonomous learning and organizing within institutionalized spaces.. and both of their interaction with the left.

04.02.2026 19:06 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Oops! Gina Myers

30.01.2026 18:29 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Feb. 7th 6PM
poetry and labor a reading and discussion

Keegan Finberg, author of Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public

Kristin Grogan, author of Stitch, Unstitch: Modernist Poetry and the World of Work

Gina Myers, author of Works & Days

Lot 49 Books
408 E Girard
Philadelphia

Feb. 7th 6PM poetry and labor a reading and discussion Keegan Finberg, author of Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public Kristin Grogan, author of Stitch, Unstitch: Modernist Poetry and the World of Work Gina Myers, author of Works & Days Lot 49 Books 408 E Girard Philadelphia

One week from tomorrow, I’ll be reading and talking to Gina Meyers and Kristin Grogan about poetry and labor. We will be waxing on about the wageless and the low-waged labors that make up most of our lives. The bookstore is called Lot 49. Philadelphia, you are perfect!

30.01.2026 18:28 👍 20 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 1
ICE Out of Our Communities!
Citywide Rally & Training
Learn what to do if you see ICE & how to get your community prepared.
Saturday, Jan. 31 | 3:30pm
Baltimore City Hall

With sponsorship by many local organizations and unions.

ICE Out of Our Communities! Citywide Rally & Training Learn what to do if you see ICE & how to get your community prepared. Saturday, Jan. 31 | 3:30pm Baltimore City Hall With sponsorship by many local organizations and unions.

Hi Baltimore!

30.01.2026 15:58 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Abolish the Border, Abolish the Police Reading List In solidarity with all those standing up for our communities against the brutality of immigrant detention and police repression, we offer an extensive reading list about border and police ab...

Yes, literally.

25.01.2026 20:08 👍 315 🔁 164 💬 2 📌 12

Philly!! I can’t wait

23.01.2026 00:22 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

Too real!!

15.01.2026 14:22 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Poster with green and yellow background, four moody black and white portraits all with interesting hair, and the green and yellow cover of University Keywords with the text:

Degrees, Debt, and the University: Andy Hines, Chris Newfield, Eleni Schirmer, and Jason Wozniak in conversation

January 27, 4:15p ET
Sproul 201, IC Dome
In-Person and Livestreamed
Free and open to the public

Supported by the Aydelotte Foundation and Swarthmore College Libraries

Poster with green and yellow background, four moody black and white portraits all with interesting hair, and the green and yellow cover of University Keywords with the text: Degrees, Debt, and the University: Andy Hines, Chris Newfield, Eleni Schirmer, and Jason Wozniak in conversation January 27, 4:15p ET Sproul 201, IC Dome In-Person and Livestreamed Free and open to the public Supported by the Aydelotte Foundation and Swarthmore College Libraries

Philly-adjacent! On 1/27 at 4:15p ET I'll talk with Chris Newfield, Eleni Schirmer, and Jason Wozniak about the University Keywords book, but also how to approach the contemporary situation in US higher education.

If you can't make it in person, you can join online. bit.ly/UniversityKeywords

13.01.2026 15:41 👍 20 🔁 8 💬 0 📌 2
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#MLA26 might be over but you can still save 30% on all
@columbiaup.bsky.social books in literary studies, including new books in poetry criticism by @xenoglossic.bsky.social, @kristingrogan.bsky.social, @keegancf.bsky.social, and @afilreis.bsky.social. Use the coupon code MLA! bit.ly/4jBA1fP

13.01.2026 12:36 👍 6 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1
Sarah Dowling, "Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form" (Northwestern UP, 2025) - New Books Network

I got to chat with @alixbeeston.bsky.social about Here Is a Figure for her @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social podcast! Alix asks such great questions, and it was really a joy to talk to her about where the book came from and what it’s about!

If you’d like to listen:
newbooksnetwork.com/here-is-a-fi...

13.01.2026 11:55 👍 28 🔁 14 💬 2 📌 0

Can’t wait to listen!

13.01.2026 12:15 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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Proposals invited: special issue: *Feminist Modernist Exiles*, to show how women’s ongoing experiences of transnational, transcultural, and translingual experiences in voluntary and involuntary exile continue to generate new forms of feminist modernism.
Info: phyllisl @ northwestern .edu

13.01.2026 08:44 👍 17 🔁 15 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
“What Welfare Does to You”: Personhood in Baltimore’s Chicory This essay explores how women and children writing lyric poetry about welfare in the 1960s and 1970s for a government-funded publication dismantled the white liberal imagination of what made poverty a...

Hi! Here is a free-access link to my essay on the War on Poverty, family abolition, and lyric technologies for @sarahmdowling1.bsky.social and Claire Grandy's brilliant special issue about "lyric beyond containment." read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

12.01.2026 20:19 👍 10 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0

I am also not at MLA but I approve this message.

11.01.2026 17:41 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Columbia UP stall

Columbia UP stall

I'm not at MLA but my book is, hanging out with @keegancf.bsky.social and flirting with Joe Brainard, as is only right

11.01.2026 17:11 👍 13 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0