Amaranth Borsuk


Amaranth Borsuk is an American poet and educator known for her experiments with textual materiality and digital poetry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, where she teaches undergraduate courses on poetry, philology, and experimental writing. She also serves as the Chair of the school's M.F.A. program in Creative Writing, which she co-chaired from 2018 to 2022.

Life

Borsuk was born in Meriden, Connecticut. She is fluent in English, French and Hebrew.
Borsuk holds a B.A. in English from the University of California Los Angeles, and an M.A. in English Literature and Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.
Borsuk was a Mellon Foundation|Mellon] in the Humanities at MIT. She has been married to software developer since 2013, and the couple have one daughter.

Works

Her work includes poetry, artist books, and collaborative digital projects, and she has a special interest in investigating textual materiality.
Her 2013 collaboration with Jesper Juul and Nick Monfort, The Deletionist, erases texts on a web screen to leave words that then form another poem by themselves, thus further exploring the tropes of overwriting and erasure.

Publications

' by Borsuk and Brad Bouse is a 2012 project that incorporated both a paper book and digital art. The paper book did not contain words but had a series of geometric patterns. Readers used a webcam to have the text appear above the book.
Between Page and Screen was reviewed by Books on Books. Laura Shackleford explains that this work renders "tangible the transactional spaces between print and language practices."
' by Borsuk and Brad Bouse is a 2014 site-specific, interactive, multimedia poetry project that uses a reader's gestures to transform a local diary into erasure poetry on the screen. As readers gesture over the computer, transcriptions from a diary dissolve as so much digital dust, leaving behind a poem. Through a webcam, the participant's shadow emerges behind the words, creating a symbolic link between the viewer and the work.
Whispering Galleries was commissioned by Site Projects, a nonprofit that supports artistic works. The project was also supported by The New Haven Free Public Library and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Originally displayed at the on April 26, 2014, it later went on to be exhibited at in New Haven, at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and ” at the Paul Watkins Gallery, Winona State University. It is available online. For the full experience, a Chrome browser, a , and a webcam are required.
ABRA by Borsuk, Kate Durbin, and Ian Hatcher was created under a National Endowments for the Arts funded Expanded Artists’ Books Grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. It was reviewed in Weird Sisters.
The Book explains the history of the book as media and explores relationships between authors, readers, and publishers.

Prizes

  • Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, 2011
  • Slope Editions Prize, 2011
  • Subito Prize, 2014