Rob Wilson

Rob Sean Wilson is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English and was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has taught in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa; Korea University in Seoul as a Fulbright professor and was National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University and National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. Since 2001, he became a professor of American literature, creative writing, and poetics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His books of poetry and cultural criticism include: Waking In Seoul; American Sublime; Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary; Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and the New Pacific; and Reimagining the American Pacific: From 'South Pacific' to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication in 2010. Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in 2010 and reissued on Kindle Books in 2020.

Rob administers two social groups on Facebook called "Beat Attitudes: World Becoming" and "Rethinking World Literature." His poems have appeared in various journals from Poetry, Ploughshares, New Republic, Jacket, and the Berkeley Poetry Review to Bamboo Ridge, Tinfish, Segue Munhak, Good Times, and Korean Culture. A dual-language poetry collection in English and Chinese called When the Nikita Moon Rose appears in the Transpacific Archipelagic Poetry Series at National Sun Yat-sen University in fall 2021. He keeps writing on the edges of all this transpacific beatitude and “busy being reborn.” Email: rwilson@ucsc.edu.