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), and New England Beyond Criticism: In Defense of America's First Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). She has another book forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell, entitled How To Read American Poetry (2017-2018).
Caitlin Ballotta Rajagopalan is the Content Lead for Poetry in America at HarvardX and a producer for Elisa New’s larger Poetry in America Project. She graduated from Harvard in 2014, where she studied English and American literature with particular emphases on poetry and Renaissance drama. Deeply interested in the intersection of education and technology, Caitlin is thrilled to help in facilitating conversations about poetry among such a broad and diverse community of online learners.
Marissa Grunes is a PhD candidate at Harvard studying 19th- and 20th- century American literature, and particularly the role of architecture in literature. She also writes about the literary culture of an internment camp in Germany during WWI for "Et Seq.," a blog of the Harvard Law School Library.
Christopher Spaide is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard, where he studies and teaches poetry, music, and comics. He is a graduate of Amherst College and the University of Oxford. Currently, he is writing a dissertation on the collective voice and the pronoun "we" in American poetry, from Whitman to now. His writing has appeared in Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Harvard Review Online. In fifth grade, he won an "Always Willing to Help Award." He will never top that.
Emmy Waldman is a PhD candidate at Harvard, where she studies Modern and contemporary poetry and visual culture. She has taught poetry at Harvard for professors including Helen Vendler, Steve Burt, and Elisa New. As an undergraduate at Yale, she juggled the writer’s pen with the painter's brush (Humanities and Studio Art). Now, she is thrilled to join the Poetry in America team at HarvardX!
Aaron Blanton is the Creative Lead at Poetry in America. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon, where he studied journalistic and narrative filmmaking. Since college, his work has garnered a Peabody Award, been featured at the 2016 Academy Awards, and reached millions of viewers around the world. At Poetry in America, he delights in challenging the assertion that education and entertainment are mutually exclusive endeavors.