Elisa New is the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University where she teaches classic American literature from Anne Bradstreet through Marilynne Robinson and from the Puritans to the present day. She is the author of The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and The Line's Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (Harvard University Press, 1999), Jacob's Cane: A Jewish Family's Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore (2009). She also has two books forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell: New England Beyond Criticism: In Defense of America's First Literature (2014) and How To Read American Poetry (2015).
Leah Reis-Dennis is a Lead Course Developer at HarvardX, focusing on the production of Poetry in America. She graduated from Harvard in 2013, where she studied American History and Literature with Elisa New, among others. Leah is also a singer/songwriter, and just released an EP of original soul music.
John North Radway teaches and writes about poetry in the broad context of modern and postmodern American literature and culture. He is finishing a dissertation at Harvard about the fate of epic in twentieth-century poetry, examining the afterlife of an ancient literary tradition amid the turbulent literary and social climate of the past hundred years. A graduate of Amherst College, he writes novels and poetry of his own when he thinks no one’s looking.
Emily Silk is a PhD student in English at Harvard, where she studies nineteenth-century American literature and culture. After graduating in 2010 from Princeton University, she spent three years in K12 public education as a research analyst and program manager at a nonprofit foundation in Washington, DC, where she focused on strategies for school implementation of online and blended learning programs.
Adrienne Raphel is a PhD candidate at Harvard, where she studies poetics and the history of the English language. She is a graduate of Princeton and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lana Turner and Boston Review, among other publications; she is also a contributor for the New Yorker online.
Caitlin Ballotta is a Content Developer at HarvardX and the newest addition to the Poetry in America team. She is a recent graduate of Harvard College (2014), where she studied English and American literature with particular emphases on poetry and Renaissance drama. Deeply interested in the intersection of education and digital technology—and also in poetry—Caitlin is thrilled to be a part of Elisa New’s course.