Walter Kalaidjian is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Emory University. A former student of Cary Nelson, Kalaidjian has gone on to become one of the leading critics of modern American poetry. He is the author of four important books, The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (Columbia UP, 1994), Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (Columbia UP, 1989), and Understanding Theodore Roethke (University of South Carolina Press, 1987).