Skip to main content

Overview


Will Brewbaker is a fourth-year PhD candidate in English. His research focuses on 20th-c. American poetry, lyric theory, poetry & poetics, and theological poetics. His dissertation, "A Theological Lyric: Encountering God in Mid-Century American Poetry," explores how these different strands of inquiry converge in the writings of a cluster of post-45 U.S. poets.

Before moving to Durham, Will received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program, as well as an MTS from Duke Divinity School. He has published his poetry in such journals as the Yale Review, Narrative, Gettysburg ReviewTriQuarterly ReviewImage, & Washington Square Review. He also reviews books of contemporary poetry regularly for both the Los Angeles Review of Books and Commonweal. His scholarly writing has appeared in Christianity & Literature.

Office Hours


Spring '25 Semester

Wednesday mornings from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. (Perkins Café)

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Recent Publications


“You must be taught to love me”: On Louise Glück’s Choral Lyric

Journal Article Christianity & Literature · March 2025 Abstract: This essay considers the American poet Louise Glück’s 1992 lyric sequence, The Wild Iris , as a contemporary instantiation of theological choral. Following W. R. Johnson’s work on choral lyric, I propose an account of both ... Full text Cite

“This sea which utters me”: Reading W. S. Graham’s “The Nightfishing” in the Theological Wake of G. M. Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland”

Journal Article Christianity & Literature · March 2024 Abstract: Despite the scant attention paid to his poetic oeuvre in U.S. academic circles, the Scottish poet W. S. Graham stands as one of the most theologically enigmatic poets of the mid-twentieth century. In this essay, I read his ... Full text Cite
View All Publications

External Links


Personal Site