A. VAN JORDAN was born and raised in Akron, Ohio, and is no stranger to the Midwest. Although much of his academic career has been spent in the South—he taught at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and, most recently, at the University of Texas at Austin—he began his academic training at Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio, for his BA in English Literature. Coming back to the Midwest to join the English department at U-M seems like a natural transition for Van. He also holds an MA in Communications from Howard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
His first book, Rise (2001), published by Tia Chucha Press and distributed by Northwestern University Press, tracks not only the history of African American music, but also the music of his life growing up in Ohio. His second book, M-A‑C-N-O-L-I-A (2004), published by W.W. Norton & Co, tells the story of MacNolia Cox, an Akron resident who was the first African American to reach the final round of the National Spelling Bee competition in 1936. Rise won the Josephine Miles PEN/Oakland award; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A was awarded an Anisfield-Wolf Award and selected as one of the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times (TLS). Van has also been awarded a Whiting Award and a Pushcart Prize.
Van is finishing up a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, and he recently published his third collection of poems, Quantum Lyrics (2007, W.W. Norton & Co.). Explaining this most recent collection of poems, Van states: “Physics becomes a unifying theme in the book. The tension is consistently the façade of male power with the undercurrent of male vulnerability. Comic book superheroes, Einstein and other famous physicists, my childhood and my relationship to my recently deceased father all come together in a bit of a cinematic montage. A good deal of the research for this book is foregrounded with notes. It seemed appropriate because so much of the book is written using concepts of which it took more than a year for me simply to understand. I don’t have a background in science and certainly not physics.”
Van joins our faculty in January 2009. He writes, “I’ve admired many of my new colleagues and their work for years. On my visits to campus, I’ve been impressed with the collegiality among them. I’m so looking forward to being a part of this department.”
Courtesy of the University of Michigan.