Stacey Waite

Stacey Waite is a poet—focusing on both slam and written verse—who also works as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Waite's poetry often explores themes of the body—of the intersections of gender, sexuality, place and relationships. She has published four award-winning collections of poetry over the past several years, including her most recent book, Butch Geography, published in 2013 by Tupelo Press. In a recent review, poet and Prairie Schooner editor Kwame Dawes called Waite "a pathfinder," who in Butch Geography in particular charts "with disarming honesty, humor, pathos, and willful perplexity the uncertain terrain of gender in ways that shatter assumptions, unsettle easy presumptions, and yet, through the sheer grace of craft ... open us to the beauty of our strange human enterprise."

• Choke - winner of the 2004 Frank O'Hara prize
• Love Poem to Androgyny - chapbook, winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Competition
• the lake has no saint - winner of the 2008 Snowbound Prize from Tupelo Press
• Butch Geography - published in 2013 by Tupelo Press

Waite is also a performance poet. She attended her first live slam poetry performance in New York City as a teen. Since moving to Nebraska, Waite has worked as a teaching artist with the Nebraska Writers Collective and its slam-poetry program Louder Than A Bomb. LTAB, as the latter is referred to, allows high school students from around the state of the Nebraska to write, practice, perform and compete in slam poetry bouts around the state. In a 2016 interview about her involvement with LTAB and the Nebraska Writers Collective, she said:

"I have seen this program transform the lives of kids all over the state, helping them gain confidence, make friends, work through trauma, and feel finally that their voices are being heard. And honestly, as a writer, there’s is nothing better than being around fearless high school poets several times each week."

Works

• Butch Defines Feminism Under the Following Conditions
• The Kind of Man I Am At The DMV
• Aunt Liz Whittles A Wooden Dollhouse

• Enszer, Julie. "'Butch Geography' by Stacey Waite". Lambda Literary. Retrieved 21 March 2016. 
• Jacobson, Aileen (1 November 2013). "In Whitman's Backyard, a Salute to Poetry". New York Times. Retrieved 21 March 2016. 
• Klingler, Sarah (4 July 2011). "Acclaimed Local Poet Encourages Summer Reading, Writing". Patch. Retrieved 21 March 2016. 

Waite is working on a book about pedagogy and the teaching of writing that will be published in 2017 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, a project that aligns with Waite's role as a writing professor and her interest in the hows and whys of teaching writing and composition to first-year college students.