Brian Teare

Brian Teare is the author of six critically acclaimed books, most recently Companion Grasses, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His honors include the Brittingham Prize and Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, as well as Guggenheim, NEA, Pew Foundation, and MacDowell Colony fellowships. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Mentor. Workshops and classes in poetry, nonfiction, environmental writing.

Statement: As a mentor, my job is to support each writer’s individual inquiry into their art, and to inhabit as a reader the negative capability Keats wrote of so beautifully, “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I strive to supply accurate description of what’s been achieved by the work at hand, and then to ask artful questions that facilitate honest self-reflection and rewriting as re-visionary work. In counterpoint to supporting artist-led inquiry, I offer a capacious sense of literary history and creative practice, drawing traditional and experimental writing and art into conversation through a feminist, queer language politics. And I encourage each writer to gather around their work an expansive, eclectic archive of writers, thinkers, and artists whose practices inspire, challenge, and drive inquiry ever deeper, stranger, and more true to their individual vision.