Sonya Posmentier is associate professor of English at New York University. Her first book Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature was published in 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and is a recipient of a William Sanders Scarborough award from the Modern Language Association. She is at work on a new book, Black Reading, about the intersecting histories of black cultural studies and modern lyric theory. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books and elsewhere, and she has published poems in Grey, Seneca Review, and Perihelion.