Sonya Posmentier

African American and Caribbean literature; Poetry and poetics; Ecological and environmental theory; Black Studies

Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, Modernist Studies Association

Caribbean Studies Association

Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Mellon Career Enhancement Fellowship, June-December 2015 First Book Institute, Center for American Literary Study, Pennsylvania State University, June 2013

William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize 

Sonya Posmentier is an associate professor in the Department of English, where she teaches African American and Black Diasporic literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and environmental literature. Her first book Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature was published in 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and is a recipient of the William Sanders Scarborough award from the Modern Language Association. She is at work on a new book, Black Reading, about the intersecting histories of black cultural studies and modern lyric theory. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books and elsewhere, and she has published poems in Grey, Seneca Review, and Perihelion. She is a member of the Postcolonial, Race, and Diaspora Studies Working Group and of the NYU Sanctuary Coalition.