American Urban Poetics

... an entirely new approach to literary study, something really new and different ...close readings informed by principles regarding the links between language and contemporary urban society that resonated strongly with her audience. Her aesthetic analysis of forms and language of works of selected contemporary Chicano and African American poets made a powerful and persuasive case for the artistic qualities of texts that others could easily overlook. Walker is an original who is working a literary landscape that is one she has discovered and one for which she designed at UC Berkeley a Ph.D dissertation that connects Social Geography, American Literature, Comparative Literature and Ethnic Studies. In American Urban Poetics she is bringing together theories, texts, and social contexts in ways that draw upon Donna Haraway's understanding of "situated knowledge" which enables her to explore the ways in which things are constantly shifting in relation to others. In the contemporary urban setting, the artist does not capture and hold people, objects, ideas, and words in place but lets us see them in moving relation to each other--Emory Elliott, University of California