Stephen Cushman is a poet and a scholar of American literature and the Civil War. His recent books include Hothead: A Poem and The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today. He is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Praise for The Red List

“Diatribe, paean, talisman, irreverent incantation, prayer, The Red List is a cosmos. . . the poem’s obvious ancestor is Song of Myself. Cushman shares Walt Whitman’s acute attentiveness, love of nature, and penchant for restless cataloging.”—Lisa Russ Spaar, Virginia Quarterly Review

“The poem gathers weight via its intention to go deliberately, unconventionally slow through the fast-paced world, yet it covers extraordinarily broad terrain in the expanse of a relatively few pages. . . . The voice is breathtaking in its honesty, humor, and empathy.”—Image

“‘Yes indeed, some days it helps to think of extinction,’ writes Stephen Cushman in his joyride of a jeremiad, The Red List. Baring everything from his soul down to his cholesterol levels, this stargazer, Biblical exegete, and campus flaneur composes a twenty-first-century self-portrait in a funhouse mirror. ‘Maybe, could it be, hopelessness is ecstasy?’ asks Cushman. Count me a believer. The Red List gives us hope for that endangered literary creature, the American poem.”—Srikanth Reddy, author of Voyager

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