C. R. Grimmer

Biography

C. R. Grimmer (they/them) is an award-winning poet, scholar, and digital humanities educator whose work bridges poetry, public scholarship, digital media, and literary criticism. They are the author of The Lyme Letters: Poems, winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Award; the chapbook O–(ezekiel’s wife); and Poets as Public Scholars: Contemporary Poetics in an Age of Social Media, an open-access, peer-reviewed multimedia book from the University of Michigan Press. Their poems, installations, and essays have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Prairie Schooner, FENCE Magazine, The Comparatist, and at the Seattle Convention Center. Their poetry has also been a finalist for Best New American Poets.

Grimmer is the creator and host of The Poetry Vlog (TPV), a digital humanities series featuring poets, artists, and scholars in conversation about poetry, culture, and media. The project has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including the Simpson Center Andrew W. Mellon Foundation “Reaching New Publics,” the Jack Straw Cultural Center, and the Center for Intersectional Gender Studies.

Their academic research explores poetry and poetics, literary studies, critical race theory, queer studies, ecocriticism, disability studies, and digital humanities. Their work has been supported by the Harlan Hahn Disability Studies Fellowship and the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy Fellowship. Grimmer holds a PhD from the University of Washington, where they were a Betty T. Johnson Research Fellow, as well as an MFA and MA from Portland State University and a BA from Oakland University.

They have taught in higher education for more than 14 years at Portland State University, the University of Washington, South Seattle Community College, Seattle University, and now Utah State University. Their current projects include Sappho on Tour: Mapping Poetry, Place, and Cultural Memory, a digital interactive mapping project, and a poetry collection on ecological catastrophe, contemporary art, desire, and Sappho.