Skip to main content
Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz
Assistant Professor

Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz teaches and researches poetry and poetics, US minority literature, and hemispheric poetry.

His current book project, Anational Poetics, reads US ethnic minority poetry from the last fifty years to chart the articulation of communities unfolding beyond the category of the nation. Foregrounding the dominant role that the idea of the nation holds in the contemporary political and literary landscape, this project proposes the concept of the anational as a lens to discern divergent forms of sociality that organize themselves independently from the nation. The book argues for a new approach to the writings of a wide range of poets (including Amiri Baraka, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jennifer Tamayo, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Simon J. Ortiz, Craig Santos Perez, Fred Moten, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs) who are more often discussed under the rubric of multiculturalism, which emphasizes diversity and inclusion and ultimately remains bound by nationalist frameworks of assimilation. By contrast, the readings offered show how these poets participate in and dissent from an extended civil rights compromise that unsettles multiculturalism by questioning their belongingness to the US. 

Contact Information
geronimo@uky.edu
1271 Patterson Office Tower
Education
PhD in English from University of Chicago
MA in Comparative Literature from University College London
BA in English Literature from School of Philosophy and Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
Research Interests
  • Minority Literature
  • Poetry & Poetics
  • Contemporary Poetry
  • Hemispheric Literature
  • Native American and Indigenous Studies
  • Marxism
  • Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Literature and Culture
Affiliations
  • English
  • Social Theory
  • African American and Africana Studies
  • Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies
  • Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies