The Annual Stanley Burnshaw Lecture

The Environment as the Place of Poetry with Ed Roberson

Wed, Oct 21, 2026

6:30 PM–8:30 PM

Martin E. Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to all.

Ed Roberson on Mt. Washington (Agiocochook), New Hampshire, date unknown. Photo courtesy Frank Daugherty.

Travel, exploration, and field research have been central to Ed Roberson’s poetry from the beginning. As far back as 1962, with his award-winning undergraduate poem “be careful,” Roberson has been using the lyric as an instrument to record sense data, attuning what happens inside the poem with the things he has seen, heard, and felt out there in the field. This lecture is about the environment in and of poetry. Roberson looks at examples from decades of his own writing about the environment on three overlapping fronts: the natural environment, the built environment, and the social environment. How is it that poems afford a space of awareness, distinct from rationality, where we can simultaneously record the outside and create a wholly new picture of reality? To get at this central question, Roberson invites us into the autobiographical backstories of select poems, illustrating how the life behind the poetry animates the life inside it. Motorcycling to the Pacific, mountaineering in the Andes, and studying freshwater ecosystems in Alaska have all played their part. But so too, Roberson reveals, have the cultural systems of understanding one encounters out in the field.

This event will be introduced by poet and author Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. Books will be available at the event.

About the Poet

Ed Roberson is the author of numerous poetry collections, including MPH and Other Road Poems (Verge Books, 2021) and Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2021), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His newest book, Red Silk Woven Carpet, The President’s Wife, and the Generals of Autumn, is forthcoming from selva oscura press.

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Roberson spent many years as a special programs administrator at Rutgers University. A Chicagoan since 2004, he has taught at Columbia College, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University. Roberson has also held posts at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Cave Canem retreat for Black Writers. Since 2023 he has served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Roberson’s varied career has also seen him working in Pittsburgh steel mills, in an advertising graphics agency, and as a research assistant in limnology, studying inland and coastal freshwater systems. His extensive travels have taken him to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes, Mexico, Bermuda, and West Africa. He has been across the United States on a BMW motorcycle.

Roberson’s many honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.

Ed Roberson standing outdoors amidst vibrant wildflowers.

This Annual Stanely Burnshaw Lecture hosted by the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center is part of a three-day series “CELEBRATING ED ROBERSON” in partnership with Poets House, which also includes a poetry craft workshop “Take Good Notes with Ed Roberson” and a poetry reading with Rosamond S. King, Dante Micheaux, Evie Shockley, and Ed Roberson.