Stacey Waite is a poet, activist, educator, and scholar who conducts research in the field of composition and the teaching of writing as well. Originally from Long Island, New York, Stacey received a Master of Fine Arts in writing in 2002 and a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011. Waite is now Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. Waite has published five collections of poems: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O'Hara Prize in Poetry), Love Poem to Androgyny (winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition), the lake has no saint (winner of the 2008 Snowbound Prize in Poetry), Butch Geography (Tupelo Press, 2013) and A Real Man Would Have a Gun (University of New Mexico Press, 2025). Waite’s most recent scholarly book, Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing, was published with the University of Pittsburgh Press in May of 2017. Waite’s books are taught at over seventy colleges and universities in Composition/Rhetoric, Creative Writing, and Gender Studies programs each year. Individual poems have been published most recently in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, The Marlboro Review, Gulf Stream, Black Warrior Review, and Court Green. Waite has also offered workshops and diversity trainings in gender multiplicity and support for queer youth in local high schools and colleges in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Nebraska, South Dakota, Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio. Waite’s work has been reviewed by many major publications, including the Lambda Literary Foundation, New Pages, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The poet Denise Duhamel calls Stacey Waite “one of the most dazzling and culturally relevant poets of our time.” About Love Poem to Androgyny, writer Jan Beatty remarks: “Love Poem to Androgyny is a collection where exhilaration meets struggle meets rage meets deliverance into the complicated body . . . This women/man thing has run its course and it’s run right into the rolling, pressing, relentless lines of Waite’s poetry.”
- BA Bucknell University
- MFA University of Pittsburgh
- PhD University of Pittsburgh
Whether I am teaching courses in composition, gender studies, or creative writing, I think of my students and myself as mutually engaged in the process of creation and disruption. I ask my students to write in ways that complicate their conceptions of narrative, form, identity, and meaning. I think of my classroom practice as driven by a pedagogy of blurring, engaging students with complexities and overlaps that help them to consider the dynamic tensions of language in their own thinking and writing. Writing offers the unique opportunity to explore the assumptions we have accumulated in a lifetime of cultural contact. This exploration not only creates spaces for layered, creative, and intellectual writing, but also requires writers to self-reflexively examine difficulties, to face what is difficult to see—something I think reaches far beyond the scope of writing itself. My students’ ideas and contributions are at the center of my own intellectual work and my classroom. I am deeply invested in my relationships with my students and feel grateful to them for showing up, time and time again, and for their infinite willingness to bring forth their curiosity, creativity, and attention.
- A Real Man Would Have a Gun. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2025.
- Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.
- Butch Geography. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2013.
- the lake has no saint. Tupelo Press, Snowbound Prize in Poetry, 2010.
- Star Professor Award, English Graduate Student Association, 2024.
- College of Arts and Sciences Community Engagement Award, 2024.
- Chancellor’s Award for Contributions the LGBTQ Community, 2017.
- Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award, Coalition of Feminist Scholars, 2017. “Cultivating the Scavenger: A Queer Feminist Future for Composition and Rhetoric” in Peitho.
- Teaching Queer, 2018 Over the Rainbow Nonfiction Titles, A Booklist from the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association
- College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2014.
- Finalist for Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, Publishing Triangle, 2014.
NCTE, CCCC, AWP, CWSO