Hannah Jane Loeb
DEGREES:
Ph.D University of Virginia (expected, May 2025)
M.A. University of Virginia (2021)
M.F.A. Iowa Writers' Workshop (2015)
B.A. Yale University (2012)
BIO:
I write, study, and teach about contemporary poems. My dissertation project, Qualified Ghost: Meter's Presence in Contemporary American Prosody, traces the ghost meter metaphor in ostensibly non-metrical poetry from the 1960s to the present, supplying terms that describe how the triangulated tension among meter, line, and syntax can simulate affective stances like grumpiness and ambivalent grief. My project stretches hauntological implication beyond the specters of historical memory, incorporating curiosity about how, through form, poets invite readers to believe in the fake for the sake of the seance: to play along.
I am a Jefferson Fellow and a Stepanian Fellow, and I was the 2023 winner of the Frank Finger Graduate Fellowship for Teaching. I have a background as a high school English teacher and a present-tense identity as a poet; my chapbook, Meats I Remember, was published by L+S Press in 2023, and my poems have appeared in literary journals including The Moth, Oxford Poetry, MAYDAY, Ninth Letter, Plainsongs, and Soundings East.
ARTICLES:
“‘Like leaves against the sunlight’: Translucent Trans-Historicism in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight.” Journal of Modern Literature, forthcoming in 2025.
“‘What came is gone forever every time’: Embedded Pentameter and Loss in Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish.’” Style 58.2, Penn State University Press, 2024, pp. 171-189.
“And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him”: Freed Verse and Loss in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England.” Contemporary Literature 64.4, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2024, pp. 525-554.