Rona Cran is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham, and the Director of the University’s Centre for the Study of North America. Their research centres on the literature and culture of New York City, queer writing, and modern American poetry. They are the author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014), and the creator of the website www.makeyourownbrainard.com. They are currently writing a second book, Everyday Rebellion: Poetry and Resistance in New York, 1960-1995, which combines close reading, creative writing, and archival research to explore the relationship between poetry and infrapolitics from the counterculture to the AIDS crisis. Recent Beat-related writing includes articles and chapters on the ecopoetics of Anne Waldman’s Life Notes, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara’s friendship, Allen Ginsberg and collage, and William Burroughs, affect, and taste.
