Travis Sharp curates, produces and presents

MFA alum Travis Sharp (’15, Creative Writing & Poetics) is a Ph.D. student in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) where he teaches writing and rhetoric. Amidst the demands of graduate life, Sharp finds space to collaborate, curate, produce, and present. For example, he was recently funded to curate a series of ephemeral texts via autodestruct.online, and this June, he will teach a workshop on experimental essays at the Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Presentations of late include the Canadian Writing Centres Association in Toronto, with UW Bothell Writing and Communication Center Director Karen Rosenberg; the National Poetry Foundation's conference, Poetry and Poetics of the 1990s, in Orono, Maine; and this spring’s Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 and the Northeast MLA (NeMLA) conference in Pittsburgh.

This past year Sharp published poems with Bombay Gin, Fact-Simile, and Ghost Ocean. He has work forthcoming with Dream Pop, Tagvverk, and YesPoetry and looks forward to his chapbook, Sinister Queer Agenda, coming out with above/ground press later this spring/early summer. His manuscript Yes, I am a corpse flower was a semi-finalist for the Subito Prize. Additionally, he and Karen Rosenberg have co-authored a case study on trans and genderqueer politics and activism in writing center pedagogy, which has been accepted for publication with The Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing.

Sharp continues to work at Essay Press, designing books and chapbooks and co-editing the EP Groundloop Series of digital chapbooks, as well as co-editing small po[r]tions with fellow MFA alums LB, Sarah Baker, and Aimee Harrison. Harrison and Sharp, along with Maria Anderson, also curated a digital anthology of Essay Press authors' responses to the 2016 US Presidential election, Radio: 11.8.16, published by Essay Press in January 2017.