Henk Rossouw

Henk Rossouw is from Cape Town, South Africa. His book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press, won the Poets Out Loud Editor's Prize. An assistant professor, Henk teaches poetry writing and poetics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

The anthology Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Myung Mi Kim, features an excerpt from Xamissa. The boxset New-Generation African Poets: Tano, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the African Poetry Book Fund/Akashic Books, includes his chapbook From Xamissa: The Water Archives. Further excerpts of Xamissa are available in Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, and forthcoming in Blackbird. He also has poems in The Paris Review and Boston Review.

He was one of the winners of the 2009 Poetry Society of America / Bright Lights Big Verse contest, which included a reading on Times Square. It's on Youtube.

Older poems are in The Massachusetts Review and Transom. Fiction can be found in Tin House, non-fiction in The Threepenny Review, and an interview with the late Nadine Gordimer in The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Henk is an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly. A poetry critic, he wrote for Boston Review the essays "Border Lyrics," on new translations by Erín Moure of Wilson Bueno and Sophie Seita of Uljana Wolf, and "On the Poetry of Institutional Violence" about the BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP's book The Work-Shy. You can also read his review in Gulf Coast of Fred Moten's stunning new book, The Service Porch.

He earned his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, in 2017, where he served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast literary journal. He has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.