John Reder
Kimo RedeR’s classes borrow tactics from Socratic dialogues and evangelical tent revivals, Esalen hot-tub encounters and Zen koan-sessions, free-association vaudeville routines and tribal talking-stick ceremonies.
His circular seating plan decenters authority, inspires participation, and keeps all involved off-balance and on-duty. This format uses the transglobal populace of a CUNY classroom as a particle collider to unleash the innate energies in the academic atom.
Dr. RedeR’s books are montages of aphorisms, micro-essays, epigrams, and lyric proverbs. His writing explores the neuroscience of literacy, sensory overlaps between verbal meaning and oral flavor, occult aspects of the alphabet, and ecstatic, visionary states of language-use like graphomania and glossolalia
His first volume, A Maxim Map of Manhattan (Regent Press, 2022), is a mosaic portrait of one of our planet’s most iconic urban settings grouped into thematic neighborhoods.
The precariously titled The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side Turns into a Tunnel of Love (CW Books, 2023) is an adventure in alliteration and assonance exploring matters of grammar, logic, and semantics, phrased as tongue-twisting, eardrum-tickling sound experiments.
Our Fingerprints Spiral Like Galaxies (Regent Press, 2023) is a quite literal “handbook” and manual of manual actions treating the human hand as a cosmic map, an insignia of personal will, and a crossroads of bodily intake and output.
Professor RedeR’s most recent volume, Every Syllable Begins a Universe (Winged Sandal Press, 2024) is a set of self-proclaimed “rogue linguistics” in which phonemes, words, and sentences are quantum events and constellations of significance.
More academically, his scholarship has appeared in such journals as Christianity and Literature, The Walt Whitman Quarterly, Semiotic Inquiry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Jacket 2, and The Routledge Companion to Food and Literature.
Expertise
Countercultural Poetry
Synaesthesia/Neuroscience of Reading and Writing
The Hermetic/Gnostic/Kabbalistic Tree of Life
Entheobotany and Consciousness Studies
Transcendentalism/Early American Utopian Communities
Pacific Rim Nature Writing
Conceptual Art/Fluxus
Post-Wittgenstein Semiotics
Degrees
- Ph.D. UCLA English 2009
- M.A. UCLA English 2005
- B.A. UCLA American Literature and Culture Summa cum laude 2002
Courses Taught
- English Composition is the standard freshman writing course. The course introduces students to academic writing. By its conclusion, students will be ready for English 201 and for the writing they will be asked to do in advanced courses across the curriculum. Students completing ENG 101 will have mastered the fundamentals of college-level reading and writing, including developing a thesis-driven response to the writing of others and following the basic conventions of citation and documentation. They will have practiced what Mike Rose calls the "habits of mind" necessary for success in college and in the larger world: summarizing, classifying, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing. Students will be introduced to basic research methods and MLA documentation and complete a research project. Students are required to take a departmental final exam that requires the composition of a 500 word, thesis-driven essay in conversation with two designated texts. Prerequisite: Pass the CAT-R and CAT-W or Accuplacer tests
- This is a course that builds upon skills introduced in English 101. In this course, literature is the field for the development of critical reading, critical thinking, independent research, and writing skills. Students are introduced to literary criticisms and acquire basic knowledge necessary for the analysis of texts (including literary terms and some literary theory); they gain proficiency in library and internet research; and they hone their skills as readers and writers. Assignments move from close readings of literary texts in a variety of genres to analyses that introduce literary terms and broader contexts, culminating in an independent, documented, thesis-driven research paper. By the conclusion of English 201, students will be prepared for the analytical and research-based writing required in upper-level courses across the curriculum; they will also be prepared for advanced courses in literature. Prerequisite: ENG 101
- This course teaches the writing of formal and informal essays, articles, and reviews in a personal voice. Through the reading of modern and contemporary essayists students learn to identify the unique qualities of writers in order to develop an individual style applicable to the various disciplines of public and personal writing.
- This course acquaints students with the wide range and varied forms of the short story as it developed in America, Europe, and other continents. Readings will include works by male and female authors of different periods and nationalities, and some attention may be paid to the historical development of the short story as a genre, as well as the cultural contexts in which the assigned stories were written. Pre-Requisite: ENG101 and ENG201 or ENG121
Research and Projects
Publications
Books:
A Maxim Map of Manhattan (Regent Press, 2022)
The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side Turns Into a Tunnel of Love (CW Books, 2023)
Our Fingerprints Spiral Like Galaxies (Regent Press, 2023)
Every Syllable Begins a Universe (Rogue Linguistics Vol. 1) (Winged Sandal Press, 2024)
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
“‘Overlap and Interlace’: Thoreau’s Thawing Sandbank as Transgenic Artwork.” Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry. (Spring 2021)
“‘Language is a Fruit the Skin of Which is Called Chatter’: Nathaniel Mackey’s Diasporic Tales of Diet-as-Dialect and Dialect-as-Drum.” Transnational Trills: Music, Politics and the Arts in the African and African Diaspora World. (Spring 2019, New York African Studies Association) pp. 261–283.
“International and Interrogative: Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions in the Global (De-)Composition Classroom.” The Enquirer. Volume Twenty-Six (Fall 2019). pp. 54-60.
“The Plumbing, Pairing and Impeachment of Pruned Pineapples: A Medley of Notes on Wallace Stevens’ Assorted Fruits.” The Wallace Stevens Journal. (Fall 2018) pp. 251-263.
“Lipped Words to Chew Upon: Thoreau’s Dietary Dialects.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food. (April 2018) pp. 410-420.
“Whitman’s Metro-Poetic Lettrism: The Mannahatta Skyline as Sentence, Syntax, and Spell.” The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Volume 35 Issue 1 (2017) pp. 88–114
“The Word Made Flesh Writ Edible: Emily Dickinson’s Micro-Eucharist of Crumb and Berry.” Christianity and Literature: The Sacramental Text Reconsidered. (June 2017) pp.520-533.
“The Ambrosia of Utterance: Oral Kinesis, Poetics, and Phonemic Flavor.” Culture, Gastronomy, and the Arts. (University of Toronto). May 2017. pp. 237-247.
“A P.S. to Genesis: Some Notes on Transgenic Bio-Art.” Twelve-Part Commentary Series in Jacket 2 (Kelly Writers House/University of Pennsylvania, Fall 2016)
“Thinking is Thinging: The Animist Urge in American Verse.” Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism & Translation (Stanford University). Issue 14, Spring 2016. pp. 283-297.
“Seeing Tongue, Tasting Eye: A Brief Survey of Words as Food in Global Poetics.” Transverse Journal (University of Toronto). Issue 15/Spring 2016. pp. 92-109.
“An Africa at Every Turn: Nathaniel Mackey’s Layered Landscapes and Puns of Place.” Antae Journal Vol. 3, No. 1 (University of Malta). Spring 2016. pp. 20-35.
“Transcendentalism,” “Robinson Jeffers,” “Thoreau’s Walden,” and “Utopian Communities” in Encyclopedia of the Environment in American Literature (McFarland Press). 2013.
“Guido Reni” in The Milton Encyclopedia (Yale University Press). 2012.
Creative Work:
“An Inventory of Proportions and Ratios”/ “Some Differences Between ‘Irony’ and ‘Paradox.’” Cloudbank. Summer 2018. pp. 32-33.
“The Rhetoric of a 3D Hologrammar.” Aaduna. April 2017.
“If Pablo Picasso Were Your Plastic Surgeon…”/ “Semiotics Sequence.” The Nomadic Journal, 2016 Edition.
“History is to Time as Guacamole is to Avocado.” Lone Stars #83. July 2016.
“The Book of ‘If’: An Inventory of Literary Conditionals.” Pomona Valley Review. PVR 10, July 2016. pp. 111-118.
“Ampersand & Ellipsis…” Symbiosis (University of Pennsylvania). April 2016. pp. 20-21.
“Crosstown Transit #’s 1-32 (from A Maxim-Map of Manhattan).” Mandala (University of Georgia). April 2016.
“The Book of Love Was Written by a Plume Undipped in Ink (A Heptameter Blues).” Brooklyn Voice, November 2014.
“(Still Looking Forward to) Canto 121” Callaloo. Fall 2010.
“If a Poem’s Margins Could Be Modeled on a Coastline…” Ascent. Fall 2010.
“American Geo-Poetic” The Antioch Review, Spring 2010.
Honors, Awards and Affiliations
Additional Information
