Bryan Dietrich is the author of a book-length study on comics, Wonder Woman Unbound, and six books of poems: Krypton Nights, Universal Monsters, Prime Directive, Love Craft, The Assumption, and The Monstrance. He is also co-editor of Drawn to Marvel, the world’s first anthology of superhero poetry. He has published poems in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, PrairieSchooner, The Harvard Review, Yale Review, Shenandoah, Open City, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Witness, Weird Tales, and many other journals. Having won The Paris Review Poetry Prize, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, the Isotope Editors’ Prize, an Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award, a Rhysling Award, and the Eve of St. Agnes Prize, Dietrich is a five-time finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Series and has been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart and the Pulitzer. A Professor of English at Newman University, Dietrich lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife Gina and their son, Nick.
His latest book, Universal Monsters is much more personal than his first, the award-winning Krypton Nights. From boudoir to abattoir, from desire to dissolution to divorce, from The Bride of Frankenstein to Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, this book engages monsters, yes, but also the everyday human traumas that rend.
Bryan Dietrich performed on February 2nd, 2011
