At the West Chester University Poetry Conference in June, Dr. Natalie Gerber of the Department of English organized and led a three-day critical seminar, “Understanding the Expressive Purposes of Rhythm: Meters, Measures, Free Verse.” A dozen poets and prosodists from around the country presented work and debated longstanding issues in the field. She is currently working on co-editing (with Nicholas Myklebust, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin) a special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language featuring full-length scholarly essays developed from the papers. Dr. Gerber also gave a popular 90-minute workshop-presentation of her current writing project, “A Poet’s Field Guide to the English Language," and has been invited back to offer another installation next summer, and served on a prosody panel that opened the conference, "The Prosodist Is In."
At the Fourth Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism, part of the Writing the Rockies conference, Dr. Gerber was one of eight poetry critics from the U.S. and the U.K. invited to give an hour-long talk and a poetry reading. Her talk was entitled, "Wallace Stevens and Lexical Rhythm."
She wrote a book review of, "The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity," by Henry Weinfield (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which will appear in The Wallace Stevens Journal in the fall. Dr. Gerber also served on a three-person panel of distinguished judges awarding the 2013 John N. Serio Award for the best annual essay published in The Wallace Stevens Journal.
