about

Nick Courtright is the founder and Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. He is the author of the forthcoming The Forgotten World, about Americanness and identity in a vast global culture, Let There Be Light, called “a continual surprise and a revelation” by Naomi Shihab Nye, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist. His prose and poetry has appeared in such places as The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine, among dozens of others.

With a Doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master of Fine Arts degree from Texas State University, and a Bachelor of Specialized Studies in Written Expression degree from Ohio University, Nick has been a professor of English at the University of Texas and at St. Edward’s, Southwestern, and Concordia Universities. His YouTube channel analyzing famous works of literature has garnered more than one million views; his doctoral dissertation, The Proofs, the Figures: Walt Whitman and the Meaning of Poems is a nearly 300-page analysis of a single eight-line poem.

An Ohio native and long-suffering Cleveland sports fan, Nick  resides in Austin, Texas with the poet Lisa Mottolo, their children Will and Sam, one dog, four birds, and some trees.

blurbs

Nick Courtright’s The Forgotten World begins with a “heritage like gum on a Walmart parking lot” and searches for a relationship with the world—what part of nature is a father, what purchase gives them a brother. In these poems the speaker, forever elsewhere, quests for a sense of self, for a new definition of family, for a fire that might make everything begin again.

Traci Brimhall

author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod and Saudade

Nick Courtright has not forgotten the world. In his poems, what tethers and separates us is visible. His language is graceful, self-aware, and highly memorable.

Eduardo C. Corral

author of Guillotine and Slow Lightning

“We’re all beggars reaching for the cup of sadness,” writes Nick Courtright, and The Forgotten World embodies that reaching. These are poems that reach for elusive truths, as their speaker seeks to understand his place inside the world, inside whiteness, inside the magnitude of empire, and the complexities of the human spirit. It’s a search that resists the comfortable answers and leads readers to a space of restless astonishments.

Matthew Olzmann

author of Contradictions in the Design and Mezzanines

The Forgotten World is a terrific book with a surprisingly wide range: it explores the world, the home, and the soul with honesty, dark humor, and love. In myriad landscapes and poetic forms, Nick Courtright skillfully depicts the complexities of balance and collapse—both the personal and universal—the past’s and the ever-impending.

Jennifer L. Knox

author of Crushing It and Days of Shame & Failure

In The Forgotten World, Nick Courtright weaves a challenging and unflinching exploration of nearness and distance, “the unmasked faces of others,” and the temporary nature of the self. It’s a journey of questioning, of the subject position of the speaker, as outsider and participant, as well as of the reader, in the face of cultural implication and personal atonement. It’s not a safe journey or book, but one we need to remember. 

John Gallaher

author of Brand New Spacesuit and In a Landscape

The Forgotten World questions what it means to be alive and what matters most. Nick Courtright writes as a witness of the everyday spirit. He uncovers the “artifacts of memory” and sews them into song. What a joy it is to sit back and listen.  

Noah Falck

author of Exclusions and Snowmen Losing Weight

In The Forgotten World, Nick Courtright explores the intersections of being a citizen of one country and the desire to live as a citizen of the world. It is a challenge, however, to embrace all and be embraced by all. What we find in these poems is keen observation of human interaction, an attempt to understand the world most us die not knowing, and the realization that most of us will remain mere tourists in this world, often nothing more than “beggars reaching for the cup of sadness.”

Octavio Quintanilla

author of If I Go Missing and 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio

Structured like a travelogue, the speakers of The Forgotten World are ever aware of their fraught and fragile relationships to the people and places around them, of the damage white men like themselves so often inflict upon the planet. There is tenderness in these pages, and humor, and a reminder that to live and love at all is a miracle. 

Amorak Huey

author of Boom Box and Seducing the Asparagus Queen

outreach
Contact Nick

nmcourtright@gmail.com
+1 740-416-0443

Where to find me

7107 Foxtree Cove
Austin, TX 78750

Keep in touch!