About

Walt Hunter’s teaching and research explore the ways poets and prose writers bring fresh perspectives to political and social issues by remaking their style and forms of expression. 

In addition to his work on faculty at Case Western Reserve University, Hunter is fiction and poetry editor for The Atlantic. His essays have appeared in publications including Modern Philology and New Literary History, and he writes frequently about novels and poems for public audiences. 

Hunter edited The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry (Atlantic Editions, 2025), an anthology of poetry published in The Atlantic since 1857. He is also the author of a collection of poetry, Some Flowers (MadHat, 2022). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, the Boston Review, the Hopkins Review, Literary Imagination, and the New York Review of Books. 

Hunter previously authored two books of literary criticism: Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham UP, 2019) and The American House Poem, 1945-2021 (Oxford UP, 2023). He is the translator of Frédéric Neyrat’s Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (with Lindsay Turner; Fordham UP, 2017).

He has received awards and fellowships from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, South Carolina Arts Commission, Teagle Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities, and James Merrill House.

Hunter teaches classes in American literature, global anglophone poetry, lyric poetry, the contemporary novel, and modern poetry from T.S. Eliot to Tracy K. Smith.