Craig Svonkin

Craig Svonkin is Executive Director of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association and Professor of English at MSU Denver. He is a fan of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (David Wilson’s mysterious meta-museum), Disneyland (but mostly from old memories and old photos), the Muppets (but mostly from their birth to a bit after Jim Henson’s death), Art (but mostly art from 1880 on), and most things fake, faux, or simulated. Craig’s essays, including “From Disneyland to Modesto: George Lucas and Walt Disney,” “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room,” and “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering,” explore American and children’s literature, culture, and film. He has also published on family structures as seen in literature, comics, and picture books, the poets Robert Lowell, Bob Kaufman, and Frank Bidart, urban spaces and unusual museums, children’s poetry, and the novelist John Fowles. His latest book is The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (co-edited with Steven Gould Axelrod, 2023), as well as the unlikely-to-be-published-before-he’s-older-and-grayer-if-ever novel, The Book of Craig.