Seth Abramson

Seth Abramson
Born	October 31, 1976 Concord, Massachusetts
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	American
Education	Master of Fine Arts, Juris Doctor

Seth Abramson (born October 31, 1976) is an American poet, editor, attorney, freelance journalist, professor; and an accused liar and literary fraud for several of his published articles.

Life

Currently an Assistant Professor of English at University of New Hampshire, Abramson is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He writes a blog on contemporary poetry for The Huffington Post and is a regular columnist for Indiewire. Abramson's Indiewire column focuses on films, television programs, and video games informed by metamodernism. Publishers Weekly notes that Abramson has "picked up a very large following as a blogger and commentator, covering poetry, politics, and higher education, and generating a controversial, U.S. News-style ranking of graduate programs in writing." Before joining the faculty of University of New Hampshire, Abramson was an attorney for the New Hampshire Public Defender and a commentator for Air America Radio.

Creative writing

Abramson has published a number of books and anthologies. The magazine Publishers Weekly describes Abramson as "serious and ambitious...uncommonly interested in general statements, in hard questions, and harder answers, about how to live."

Colorado Review called Northerners, Abramson's second collection of poetry, "alternately expansive and deeply personal...of crystalline beauty and complexity," terming Abramson "a major American voice." Notre Dame Review echoed the sentiment, calling Abramson "a powerful voice."

Abramson won the 2008 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize. Poetry editor Don Share said of Abramson's "What I Have" that "the poem absorbs certain details but doesn't fasten upon them the way poets are tempted to do; it's not adjectival, it's not descriptive, it's not painting a kind of canvas with scenery on it, and yet those details are really fascinating."

Best American Experimental Writing

Abramson, with the poet Jesse Damiani, has been Series Co-Editor of the annual anthology of innovative verse, Best American Experimental Writing, since its inception with Omnidawn in 2012. The series was picked up by Wesleyan University Press in 2014.

The MFA Research Project

Abramson authors The MFA Research Project (MRP), a website that publishes indexes of creative writing Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs based on surveys and hard-data research. Indexes appearing on the MRP include ordered listings of program popularity, funding, selectivity, fellowship placement, job placement, student-faculty ratio, application cost, application response times, application and curriculum requirements, and foundation dates. The MRP also publishes surveys of current MFA applicants, and of various creative writing programs. Writing for The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945, Hank Lazer described Abramson's project as "a daring and data-rich endeavor." The Missouri Review observed that Abramson, along with novelist Tom Kealey, "had done a tremendous amount of work to peel back the layers of MFA programs and get applicants to make informed decisions."

Data from the MRP has been regularly published by Poets & Writers since 2009. The Chronicle of Higher Education has termed the Poets & Writers national assessment methodology "comprehensive" and "the only MFA ranking regime." The data is not without its critics. In September 2011, a critical open letter signed by professors from undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs was published. In their response, Poets & Writers asserted that it adhered to the highest journalistic standards. The rankings' primary researcher, the magazine's Editorial Director Mary Gannon said of Abramson that he "has been collecting data about applicants' preferences and about MFA programs for five years, and we stand behind his integrity."

Controversy

In May 2014, Abramson was criticised for his Huffington Post piece "Last Words for Elliot Rodger", a "remix" of words taken from the final YouTube video of the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings, which Abramson published less than two days after they took place. Both the reuse of Rodger's words and the timing of the poem caused offence. Although Abramson called the work "a vehicle for amity and compassion", Omnidawn, Abramson's publisher at the time, issued a statement saying that it was "dismayed, disheartened, distressed", adding that "his actions in this matter are not in alignment with our principles."

In December 2015, an article written by Abramson for The Huffington Post went viral, receiving more than 120,000 "likes" on Facebook and more than 17,000 shares via the social media website. The article, which criticized the J.J. Abrams film Star Wars: The Force Awakens for its alleged plot holes, was quickly followed by two additional articles on the film, the second of which, "10 Reasons Star Wars: The Force Awakens Is the Best Star Wars Film Ever Made," argued that the film in fact had no plot holes. The first two of these articles were widely criticised by fans of The Force Awakens, with Indiewire noting that, while there were some "lazy shortcuts" in the film, "most of the things Abramson cites as plot holes are just things he finds implausible or simply doesn't like." After an assertion by Abramson that his two contradictory articles about the film were intended as experimental literature, Film School Rejects wrote that "whether or not Abramson intended for this to be a grand social experiment, the controversy surrounding his Star Wars articles has created an interesting litmus test of how we categorize and respond to various types of film criticism."

Opposition to Trump

Abramson started tweeting about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government. Several media publications have described Abramson as a conspiracy theorist, a label that Abramson rejects, while Politico has praised his "theory-testing" as "urgently important." Abramson tweets fictionalize contacts between Trump campaign members and Vladimir Putin's associates. Abramson claims that Trump and Putin agreed in 2013 that Trump would run for president to disrupt U.S. politics, and that Putin would in return greenlight the multibillion dollar Trump Tower Moscow deal and use Russian intelligence capabilities to aid the Trump campaign. According to the Washington Post, Abramson's "evidence isn’t so clear cut. Abramson cites a 2014 tweet from a Russian lifestyle blogger (“I’m sure @realDonaldTrump will be great president! We’ll support you from Russia!“) as “proof” that Trump’s companions on the Moscow trip knew he’d run for president long before he announced it. But this ignores that Trump was openly flirting with a presidential run for years." The Washington Post notes that facts tend to be "sprinkled into his threads with more fantastic sounding claims," and "Abramson’s tweets link copiously to sources," but they range in quality from political news investigations to "off-the-wall Facebook posts and tweets from Tom Arnold."

Awards

• 2012, Akron Poetry Prize
• 2010, Green Rose Prize
• 2008, J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize

Selected Works

Books

• Best American Experimental Writing 2018 [Series Co-Editor] (Wesleyan University Press, 2018)
• An Insider's Guide to Graduate Creative Writing Degrees (Bloomsbury, 2018)
• Golden Age (BlazeVOX Books, 2017)
• Best American Experimental Writing 2016 [Series Co-Editor] (Wesleyan University Press, 2016)
• DATA (BookThug, 2016)
• Metamericana (BlazeVOX Books, 2015)
• Best American Experimental Writing 2015 [Series Co-Editor] (Wesleyan University Press, 2015)
• Best American Experimental Writing 2014 [Series Co-Editor] (Omnidawn, 2014)
• Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013)
• Northerners (New Issues/Western Michigan University Press, 2011)
• The Poets & Writers Guide to MFA Programs [Contributing Author] (Poets & Writers, 2011)
• The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009)
• The Creative Writing MFA Handbook [Contributing Author] (Continuum Publishing, 2008)

Anthologies

• After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University (University of Iowa Press, 2017)
• The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2013)
• Poetry of the Law (University of Iowa Press, 2010)
• Best New Poets 2008 (University of Virginia Press, 2008)
• Lawyers and Poetry (West Virginia University Press, 2001)
• Xconnect (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)

Interviews

• As It Ought to Be (March 12, 2014) [1]
• Poem of the Week (January 29, 2014) [2]
• Full Stop (November 8, 2012) [3]
• LitBridge (September 14, 2012) [4]
• Poetry Society of America (March 12, 2010) [5]