Books When We Talk about Home | 2026
Awarded PEN American Jean Stein Prize for Oral History. Narrative non-fiction. New Press. Forms of Waiting: Poetry, Oral history and Testimony of Displacement | Awarded Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Under review. Conversations with New York School Poets | 2025 Collection of 26 interviews conducted with NYS poets, edited by Yasmine Shamma and Rona Cran. EUP. Migration, Culture, and Identity: Making Home Away | 2023. Edited Collection, with Suzan Ilcan, Vicki Squire, and Helen Underhill, Palgrave. Joe Brainard's Art | 2019 Edited Collection. Edinburgh University Press. (See below for more) Spatial Poetics: The Second Generation New York School of Poetry | 2018. Oxford University Press. (See below for more) |
ArticlesDear Frank, Hello: Second Generation New York School Poetry | 2025.
Forthcoming in Frank O'Hara in Context, edited by Andrew Epstein. Diary of Disappearances: Palestinian Processes | 2025. Forthcoming in Handbook of New Directions in Memory and Literature, edited by Susannah Radstone, Palgrave/Chicago. Playing Tennis with Beirut | Late 2023. in Special Issue of Life Writing: Illness Writing in Lebanon: Converging Pathologies and Lived Narratives Since August 4, 2020, to be published with Routledge. Fictions of Home: Arab-American Writing of Displacement | 2023. in Handbook of Home and Migration, edited by Paolo Boccagni. Making Home in Earth: Postcolonial EcoGlobalism | 2022. in Migration, Culture, and Identity: Making Home Away, part of the Politics of Citizen and Migration Series, forthcoming with Palgrave. The Waiting of Waraq Enab | Summer 2021 ArabLit. Diversity in The New York School of Poetry | In Progress. The Long Poem that is Life: Feminism as Long Form | In Progress, for Poetry. Heaven is Green: Refugee Ecoglobalism | September 2020 Special Issue of Journal of Narrative Theory The Woman who Planted a Tree: A Conversation | September 2020 Special Issue of Journal of Narrative Theory Both in Refugee Camps and in Lockdown, Gardens offer Relief | August 2020 The Independent (reprint of Conversation piece). On Waiting | July 2020 Empty Mirror Gardens as Refuge: Refugee and Lockdown gardens| July 2020 The Conversation. The New York Schools?: Towards a Definition | 2020 New York: A Literary History, ed. Ross Wilson (Cambridge University Press). “What You're Missing:" Poetics of the Ordinary | July 2019 American Book Review. Joe Brainard's Collage Aesthetic: Introduction | 2019 The Aesthetics of Joe Brainard, Ed. Yasmine Shamma (Edinburgh University Press). "Room in the Room that You Room In:" Ted Berrigan's Domestic Poetry | 2015 Spatial Perspectives: Essays on Literature and Architecture. Eds. Terri Mullholland and Nicole Sierra. (UK: Peter Lang, 2015) 191-213. "The Room Enclosed:" T.S Eliot's Settings | 2011 The Wasteland at 90: A Retrospective. Ed. Joe Moeffett (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 2011) 164-186. "How Did it All Fit In:" Alice Notley’s "101" | 2010 British Association of American Studies Journal, Vol. 17, 2010. Drenched: Wet Poetries of the Caribbean Diaspora | 2008 Caribbean Without Borders: Literature, Language and Culture. Eds. Dorsia Smith Raquel Puig and Illeana Santiago (Newcastle, UK : Cambridge Scholars, 2008). |
Interviews & Reviews
Dear Joe (review) | review of Love, Joe. 2024 for Poetry.
Post-Millenial Postcolonial (review)| 2021 for Contemporary Levant. Bill Berkson on Frank O'Hara | 2021 for American Literary History Online. Never Proclaiming one Colour: A poet of oscillation and inversion | June, 2020. Times Literary Supplement. Diana Di Prima's Visionary Poetics | Summer 2020, Modern Language Review. Review of The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America. The Review of English Studies, Volume 69, Issue 288, February 2018, Pages 196–198. Talking to Yasmine Shamma: Andy Fitch in conversation | 2018 LA Review of Books (January 18, 2018). Day of All Saints | 2017 In conversation with Patricia Grace King. READ, Durham University (December 2017). Review of The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America. Solicited by The Review of English Studies, for publication in 2017. Multitudes: American Poetry Now | 2017 Essays in Criticism Essay Review of Cambridge History of American Poetry (July 2017). In Conversation with Ron Padget | 2014 PN Review 215. 40.3 (January 2014) “ ‘Mental Orgasm.’ ”| 2014 Review of The Collected Poems of Ron Padgett, by Ron Padgett, New York: Coffee House, 2012. Poetry (June 2014). Review of The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes | 2013 ed. T. Gifford, Cambridge UP: 2012. Notes and Queries (July 2013). Review of A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion and the Uncanny | 2013 by Sarah Brown, Manchester UP, 2012. Times Literary Supplement (May 2013). "Dancing in a Straitjacket:" Interview with Ron Padgett | 2013 Jacket 2 (April 2013). “Walking that Stretch:" Alice Notley, in Conversation with Yasmine Shamma | 2010 Jacket Magazine 40 (Late 2010). “ ‘Messy Red Heart:’ Ted Berrigan” | 2011 Review of The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan, by Ted Berrigan, eds Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan, U of California P, 2010. PN Review 200. 37.6 (July 2011): 73-75. “ ‘A Crack in the Teacup Opens’” | 2010 Review of Intimate Exposure: Essays on the Public Private Divide in British Poetry since 1950,” eds. Emily Taylor Merriman and Adrian Grafe, McFarland, 2010. Essays in Criticism 61: 105- 113. |
More on Books
Edited Collection (2019)
A book length collection of reflections and essays on the poetry and art of Joe Brainard. Includes contributions from John Ashbery, Alice Notley, John Brainard, Ron Padgett, Edmund Berrigan, Brian Glavey, Andrew Epstein, Andy Fitch, Jess Cotton, Rona Cran, Nick Sturm, Tim Keane, Nathan Kernan, Anna Smaill, and Marjorie Perloff.
Review excerpt: "Shamma has done a fine job of gathering commentary from Brainard’s circle and beyond, bringing this "anti-heroic, humble and lyric" writer and artist into critical focus. These essays and tributes help us to fully appreciate the richness and complexity of both the man and his work." - Bonnie Costello, Boston University Published by Edinburgh University Press (April, 2019). |
Monograph (2018)
This book examines the ways in which the contours of Second Generation New York School poems register the built environments from which they were composed. It builds upon Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space through close readings of Second Generation New York School poetry, to argue that avant-garde contemporary poetry has been written with space in mind. With chapters focusing on the works of Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, and Joe Brainard, it offers the first comprehensive definition of Second Generation New York School Poetry.
Review excerpt: "This, the first study of second-generation New York School poetics is a model of careful scholarship and critical discrimination. Writing under the sign of Frank O'Hara but with their own spin, poets like Ron Padgett and Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard, have produced an exciting body of the work that has not received the attention it deserves. Spatial Poetics is a genuinely valuable and original addition to studies of contemporary American poetry and poetics." - Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita, Stanford University Published October 4, 2018, Spatial Poetics may be purchased by libraries here Previewed here |
This book is about homemaking in situations of migration and displacement. It explores how homes are made, remade, lost, revived, expanded and contracted through experiences of migration, to ask what it means to make a home away from home. We draw together a wide range of perspectives from across multiple disciplines and contexts, which explore how old homes, lost homes, and new homes connect and disconnect through processes of homemaking. The volume asks: how do spaces of resettlement or rehoming reflect both the continuation of old homes and distinct new experiences?
Based on collaborations with migrants, refugees, practitioners and artists, this book centres the lived experiences, testimonies, and negotiations of those who are displaced. The volume generates appreciation of the tensions that emerge in contexts of migration and displacement, as well as of the ways in which racial categories and colonial legacies continue to shape fields of lived experience.
Professor Shamma served as lead editor of this project, and contributed within it an essay on refugee tendencies to plant gardens.
This book may be purchased here, and accessed via institutional log in here.
Based on collaborations with migrants, refugees, practitioners and artists, this book centres the lived experiences, testimonies, and negotiations of those who are displaced. The volume generates appreciation of the tensions that emerge in contexts of migration and displacement, as well as of the ways in which racial categories and colonial legacies continue to shape fields of lived experience.
Professor Shamma served as lead editor of this project, and contributed within it an essay on refugee tendencies to plant gardens.
This book may be purchased here, and accessed via institutional log in here.
