Join us at PAMLA 2025 for one of our three Thursday Spotlight events, featuring poet, critic, and scholar Stephanie Burt, who will be presenting “Kurt Cobain, the Jack of Hearts, Poetry, Game Theory, and Me” on Thursday, November 20 (3:10–4:05 pm). In this talk, Burt explores her fascination with self-destructive queer-coded characters and the real-life artists who reflect them. She will discuss figures including Kurt Cobain, Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Bishop, Terrance Hayes, and Marvel Comics characters, asking whether art can help us reckon with our attraction to self-destructive and self-erasing behaviors.
Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with ten published books, including the recent Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift, which was just featured in The Atlantic’s October issue. Her work continues to bridge the worlds of poetry, criticism, and popular culture, offering readers new ways to think about art, music, and identity. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other works include We Are Mermaids; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.
RSVPs requested but not required to attend this exciting Thursday Spotlight; please log into pamla.ballastacademic.com and register via the Registration tab so we can better anticipate attendance numbers.