{{Infobox writer | name = Joan Retallack | image = | imagesize = | caption = | birth_name = | birth_date = | birth_place = Manhattan, New York | death_date = | death_place = | occupation = Poet, scholar | alma_mater = B.A., University of Illinois, Urbana; M.A., Georgetown University | spouse = | subject = | period = | genre = poetry, essay | movement = Postmodern | notableworks = 'The Poethical Wager, "Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d", "Memnoir," "How To Do Things With Words," "Afterrimages," "Errata 5uite" | awards = Columbia Book Award (2010), Lannan Foundation Poetry Award (1998–99), America Award in Belles-Lettres, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. | signature = }} Joan Retallack (born October 13, 1941) is an American poet, critic, biographer, and multi-disciplinary scholar. She is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College where she teaches courses in poetics, poethics, and experimental traditions in the arts. Retallack directed the Language & Thinking Program at Bard for ten years and is currently participating in the development of an Arabic Language & Thinking Program at Al-Quds University, the Palestinian university in Jerusalem. Her work has been translated into six languages. In 2009, she delivered the Judith E. Wilson Poetics Lecture at Cambridge University, which hosted a two-day conference on her work. Her interests in poetics include polylingualism, ecopoetics, and the poethics of alterity. Life and work Born in Manhattan October 13, 1941, she grew up in Chelsea, the Bronx, and Charleston S.C., spending time in the mid-West before moving in the sixties to Washington D.C. where she was active in arts, antiwar, and civil rights groups based at the Institute for Policy Studies. She took part in many socio- political actions during that time, including the education project for Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign. Her collage-constructions were exhibited in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Rental Gallery, and she was part of a community of D.C. experimental poets before moving to her present home in the Hudson Valley. Joan Retallack received her B.A. from the University of Illinois, Urbana and her M.A. from Georgetown University. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, winning many awards including the Columbia Book Award, a Lannan Foundation Poetry Award (1998–99), the America Award in Belles-Lettres, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Retallack is the author of