Karen Jackson Ford is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. A former student of Cary Nelson, Ford works on the politics of poetic form in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry. She is the author of Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer & The Poetics of Modernity (Alabama, 2005), Gender and the Poetics of Excess: Moments of Brocade (Mississippi, 1997), and essays on Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the Blues. She is currently writing a book about race and poetic form in the US.