New Faculty Spotlight: Kylan Rice

For new English Department Assistant Professor Kylan Rice, an MFA and PhD wasn’t really what he was pursuing when in school, though he earned both. What he was really choosing to study and pursue was poetry, not any specific degree. Along the way, he realized a graduate degree was the necessary next step for him in his journey to becoming a scholar of poetry.

For new English Department Assistant Professor Kylan Rice, an MFA and PhD wasn’t really what he was pursuing when in school, though he earned both. What he was really choosing to study and pursue was poetry, not any specific degree. Along the way, he realized a graduate degree was the necessary next step for him in his journey to becoming a scholar of poetry. 

However, Kylan doesn’t just study English or poetry — he actively engages himself in learning about literary history. “Probably during my MFA, I came to the conviction that poems join readers and writers in and across time, that poetry is a medium for transhistorical communication, and I think I must have drawn on this idea as I devoted myself during my PhD to the study of historical poetics, to the study of nineteenth-century American poetry,” Kylan reflects. “A poem is always talking to other poems, singing or humming along in a general human chorus that reverberates down through the centuries. And so, I think it’s important for anyone interested in poetry to also be a student of literary history.”

As an academic, Kylan has a plethora of impressive accomplishments, including his two poetry collections: An Image Not a Book, published in 2023 from Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions, and Name & Earth, published earlier this year from Bench Editions. A third collection of his, Cloud on Page Opposite, was just accepted for publication and is scheduled to be released in early 2027 by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions. He also co-edits a small, thriving poetry press, Thirdhand Books, with the poet Lindsey Webb. 

Kylan is currently working on his first academic monograph, The Costs of Cherishing, in which he contributes to the recovering and repositioning of nineteenth-century women writers central to literary culture then and now. 

“It’s a study of how nineteenth-century American women poets resisted the gendered obligation to cherish portable forms of sentimental property like keepsakes and heirlooms, which signified and helped sustain normative, sometimes oppressive intimacies,” Kylan explains. “Essentially, I argue that poets like Frances Sargent Osgood, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Piatt, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray attended to the raw materiality of precious, hard-to-dispose-of objects as a way of destabilizing the social meanings attached to them and reasserting or renegotiating their emotional autonomy in the process.” 

Now at USU, Kylan has already made a large impact on students with his American Writers course on Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, Introduction to Poetry, Nineteenth-Century American Literary History, and Literary Analysis. He says, “Each has been a joy to teach for different reasons! In general, though, I think I’ve most enjoyed getting to know the student body here, both in the department and the university more broadly. I have been consistently impressed with the quality of student work and engagement.” 

Moving to Utah has also allowed Kylan to be closer to his family, who moved to American Fork from where he grew up in Southern Oregon. Between this closeness, cycling on country roads, and exploring new places in Cache Valley, Kylan is excited to be at USU, and the English Department is excited to have him as a welcome addition.