Faculty

Mark Irwin

Associate Professor of English

Contact Information
E-mail: mirwin@email.usc.edu
Phone: (213) 821-0477
Office: THH 431

LINKS
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website

Education

Ph.D. English (1982), Case Western Reserve University

M.F.A. Poetry (1980) Iowa Writers Workshop, The University of Iowa    

Description of Research

Mark Irwin is a nationally acclaimed poet and four-time Pushcart Prize winner who has been described as a "descendant of William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane.” He is the author of ten collections of poetry, and he has also translated several French and Romanian works. Irwin teaches undergraduate and graduate poetry workshops.

Interests:  Forms of Seeing, Way of Listening is a graduate forms class that examines how contemporary poets, painters, and composers cross new boundaries and borders in works that provide unique ways of seeing or perceiving the world. Artists include John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, W.S. Merwin, Alice Notley, Mary Ruefle, Eric Fischl, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Philip Glass, and Joan Tower.

Research Specialties:

EcoPoetics: Professor Mark Irwin is a working member of the Levan Environmental Humanities Group at USC, which focuses on climate change, species extinction, global pollution, and racial geographies in the Anthropocene Era. 

Professor Mark Irwin chairs, along with Provost Professor Enrique Martinez Celaya, the Levan  Humanities Working Group: Poetry, Painting, & Place in a Placeless World of Global Communication. The group focuses on how technology induces motility within poetry and the visual arts.

Publications

Poetry

• Shimmer (Anhinga Press, 2020)
  
• A Passion According to Green (New Issues, 2017)
• American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014) (AU Poetry Press)
• Large White House Speaking (New Issues, 2013)
• Tall If  (New Issues, 2008)
• Bright Hunger (BOA, 2004)
• White City (BOA, 2000)
• Quick, Now, Always (BOA, 1996)
• Against the Meanwhile (Wesleyan, 1988)
• The Halo of Desire (Galileo, 1987)

Honors and Awards

• USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, for Tall If, Spring 2010

• Mellon Mentoring Award for Graduate Students, 4/21/2009

• 2006 Pushcart Prize for Poetry, 6/9/2006-12/30/2006

• Colorado Book Award for Poetry for Bright Hunger, 2005-2006

• Lois Beebe Hayna Award/Western Poetry Society, 2/12/2006

• Poems featured several times on The Writer’s Almanac and Poetry Daily