I’m a poet and a scholar, interested in a wide and unruly range of subjects: 19th-century architecture, the colonial history of the Midwest, Renaissance poetry, poets’ theater. Before coming Beloit, I received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from Northwestern University. I also held a 2021 Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and I’ve received fellowships from the Graham Foundation and MacDowell.

In my classes, we study writing and literature as a living conversation. I encourage my students to explore the ways in which writers work with, through, and against their predecessors. And I ask students to join those conversations, objecting to their terms and expanding their possibilities.

I am the author of three books of poetry, Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2022) and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). I am currently completing a monograph, The Diachronic Renaissance: Periodization, Poetics, and the Shock of the Old, about the strange, subterranean connections between Renaissance and avant-garde poetries. My writing can be found in literary and scholarly journals such as Contemporary Literature, English Literary History, Gulf Coast, Jacket2, and jubilat.

You can learn more about me and read some of my writing at my personal website: tobyaltman.com