Seth Abramson



Seth Abramson (born October 31, 1976, Concord, Massachusetts) is an American poet, attorney, editor, and freelance journalist.

Life
Abramson is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is currently a doctoral student in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a Senior Editor for the literary magazine Devil's Lake.

Publishers Weekly notes that Abramson has "picked up a very large following as a blogger and commentator, covering poetry, politics, and higher education, and generating a controversial, U.S. News-style ranking of graduate programs in writing." In recommending Northerners, the poet's second collection of poetry, the magazine called Abramson "serious and ambitious...uncommonly interested in general statements, in hard questions, and harder answers, about how to live." Don Share, Senior Editor for Poetry, has said of Abramson's "What I Have," awarded the 2008 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize by Poetry, "the poem absorbs certain details but doesn't fasten upon them the way poets are tempted to do; it's not adjectival, it's not descriptive, it's not painting a kind of canvas with scenery on it, and yet those details are really fascinating."

A former public defender, poetry editor, and commentator for Air America Radio, Abramson was nominated for a Koufax Award in 2005 and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post on the topic of graduate creative writing programs.

MFA Rankings
Abramson authors The Suburban Ecstasies, a website that publishes rankings of creative writing Master of Fine Arts programs on the basis of their popularity among applicants, as determined through surveys conducted on The Creative Writing MFA Blog, a website run by novelist Tom Kealey since 2005. The Suburban Ecstasies also ranks programs on the basis of their funding, selectivity, student-to-faculty ratio, job placement, fellowship placement, and other data provided by the programs themselves. In 2009 these rankings were adopted by Poets & Writers. Poets & Writers now publishes these rankings annually, having expanded them to include (beginning in 2010) an assessment of low-residency MFA programs. The methodology for these rankings was published by Poets & Writers in 2010.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has termed the Poets & Writers MFA rankings "the only MFA ranking regime." Writing in Boulevard and The Huffington Post, novelist and poet Anis Shivani noted the "great brouhaha" caused by "a journeyman's attempt to rank MFA programs...according to input from potential apprentices as opposed to evaluations by journeymen and masters themselves." Avant-garde literary critic Ron Silliman claims Abramson's research and writing on MFA programs is part of a larger sea change in American poetics; according to Silliman, "Abramson's take [on poetry in American life] is new and different. And important....[he believes] we are moving away from poetry as a literature--let alone as a canon--toward poetry as a practice..." The Poets & Writers rankings have also been criticized, however. The Association of Writers & Writing Programs in particular has been highly critical of the rankings' methodology, stating that "the tutelage of an artist is a complex and serious business, and it cannot be reduced to a single spreadsheet column sorted in descending order."

In September 2011, an open letter signed by nearly two hundred professors from undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs was published, calling the rankings "specious" and terming their methodology "unethical" and "quite misleading." A week later, Poets & Writers responded to the open letter, asserting that it had "adhere[d] to the highest journalistic standards...Our ethical obligation is to be transparent to our readers about the source of the rankings and how they were derived, which we have done consistently and without reservation." Of Abramson, the rankings' primary researcher, the magazine's Editorial Director Mary Gannon said, "[he] has been collecting data about applicants' preferences and about MFA programs for five years, and we stand behind his integrity."

Recognition

 * 2010, Green Rose Prize
 * 2008, J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize
 * 2008, Best New Poets selection (ed. Mark Strand)

Poetry

 * Northerners (New Issues/Western Michigan University Press, 2011)
 * The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009)

Non-fiction

 * The Creative Writing MFA Handbook, 3rd Ed. (Continuum Publishing, 2012) [co-author]
 * The Creative Writing MFA Handbook, 2nd Ed. (Continuum Publishing, 2008) [contributing author]

Anthologized

 * Two Weeks: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (Linebreak, 2010)
 * Poetry of the Law (University of Iowa Press, 2010)
 * Best New Poets 2008 (University of Virginia Press, 2008)
 * Digerati (Three Candles Press, 2006)
 * Lawyers and Poetry (West Virginia University Press, 2001)
 * XConnect (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)