Andrea Rexilius

Andrea Rexilius is the author of Sister Urn (Sidebrow, Spring 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks, Séance (Coconut Books, 2014), To Be Human (Horseless Press, 2010), and Afterworld (above/ground press, 2020).

She earned an M.F.A. in Poetry from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Denver (2010). Her creative and critical writing is featured in: Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre (U of Michigan P, 2015), The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow Books, 2014), Sixty Morning Talks: Serial Interviews with Contemporary Authors (Ugly Duckling Press, 2014), Letter Machine Book of Interviews (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), as well as the literary journals: Academy of American Poets, Coldfront, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, How2, Jubilat, and Volt, among others. Her essay on the poet Laura (Riding) Jackson, "Against the Commodity of the Poem," is archived on the Nottingham Trent University Laura (Riding) Jackson Scholarship page. From 2012-2015 she held the position of Assistant Professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she also acted as Faculty Director for the Summer Writing Program. From 2017-2021 she taught in and co-directed the Poetry Collective at Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

Mentor Statement

As a mentor, I pay attention to the unique ways in which the form and content of a writer’s work coalesce. By looking closely at the decisions a writer has made about word choice, line breaks, and form, I seek to engage with the poem and the poet on both the practical and hermeneutical level of writing. I believe in reading widely from a range of aesthetic and cultural backgrounds and I assign essays and writing prompts along with semester reading lists. I specialize in documentary poetics, serial poems and hybrid forms.