Margaret Ronda

Margaret Ronda joined the UC-Davis faculty in 2014 after teaching in the Department of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. Her critical book, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (Post*45 Series, Stanford University Press, 2018), attends to the ways American poets and poems dramatize an ever-clearer sense of planetary environmental crisis by reimagining poetic genres such as pastoral and elegy. Her essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar won the William Riley Parker Prize from the MLA for the "outstanding essay" in PMLA in 2013. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, The Brown Foundation, and the Hellman Fellows Fund. She is the author of two books of poetry, Personification (2010) and For Hunger (2018), both published by Saturnalia Books. She serves as an associate editor for Contemporary Literature.

Critical Book

Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (Stanford University Press, Post*45 Series)

Interview about Remainders with Andy Fitch in LARB.

Selected Publications

“Monster/Dobbs/Self,” The Barbara Johnson Collective, eds. Devin Garafolo and Nathan Hensley, Northwestern University Press, forthcoming, 2026. 

“‘Among the Cotton and Corn’: The Poetics of Boll Weevil Ecologies in the Cotton South,” Bale After Bale: Cotton Modernity, ed. David Davis, University of Virginia Press, forthcoming, 2025.

"Friendship's Forms," Paideuma 50 (2025), Symposium: The Poems We Live With.

"Lyric/Time: Capitalist Ecologies, Timefulness, and the Lyric 'I.'" The Hopkins Review, Folio on 'Locating a Collective Lyric 'I,'" Vol 17, No 1, 2024.

"Georgics from Below." Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2023.

"Spell and Survival Techniques: Dreams as Procedure." Amodern, special issue on "Body and/as Procedure." 2023.

"Abortion's Poetic Figures." Post45 Contemporaries, 2023.

"Energy Ecopoetics," co-authored with Kristin George Bagdanov. Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. 2023.

Poetry for the Deluge, Public Books, February 2022.

"Ballad Poetics in the Era of Black Lives Matter." American Literary History 34.4 (2022).

"'alive to such work': On Emily Wilson's 'Nocturne,'" Annulet Issue 3, 2022.

"Rethinking the Anthropocene: Contemporary Ecopoetics and Epochal Imaginings," Wiley-Blackwell Companion to American Poetry, 2022.

"Organic Form, Plastic Forms: The Nature of Plastic in Contemporary Ecopoetics," Life in Plastic, ed. Caren Irr. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

"Nature,"  Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism, ed. Mark Steven. Bloomsbury Press, 2021.

"Affect and Environment in Contemporary Ecopoetics." In Affect and Literature (Cambridge Critical Concepts Series). Ed. Alex Houen. Cambridge UP, 2020.

First-Person Plural: On Mark Nowak's Social Poetics, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2020.

"The Social Forms of Speculative Poetics," Cluster on Poetry's Social Forms, Post45 Contemporaries, 2019.

"'Everywhere, Worlds Connect': Realist Poetics and the Ecologies of Capitalism." In Writing Against Capital: Communism and Poetics. Eds. Julian Murphet and Ruth Jennison. Palgrave, 2019.

"Obsolesce." Veer Ecology. Eds. Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert. U of Minnesota P, 2018.

"'At the edge of what we know': Gender and Environment in American Poetry." Cambridge Companion of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. Ed. Linda Kinnahan. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Introduction and essay, "Outside of Knowledge," Feature on the "Poet Scholar," Jacket2, 2015.

"'Not one': The Poetics of Multitude in Great Recession-Era America." In Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature. Ed. Andrew Lawson. Routledge, 2014.

"Red." Co-authored with Tobias Menely. In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minnesota University Press, 2014.

"Anthropogenic Poetics." the minnesota review 83, Winter 2014. Special issue on "Writing the Anthropocene." Eds. Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall.

"Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene." Post45 Peer Reviewed, June 2013.

"Georgic Disenchantment in American Poetry." Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 46.1, Spring 2013.

"'Work and Wait Unwearying': Dunbar's Georgics." PMLA 127.4, October 2012.

"Agency Without Subjects," English Language Notes 50.1, Spring/Summer 2012.

"'Not Much Left'": Wageless Life in Millenial Poetry." Post45 Contemporaries, 2011.

Poetry Books

For Hunger, Saturnalia Books, 2018.

Personification, Saturnalia Books, 2010.

Selected Awards

Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, Graduate and Professional Teaching, 2024.

College of Letters & Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, 2023.

Dora Maar Fellowship, Brown Foundation, 2022.

Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award, 2020.

Hellman Fellowship, UC Davis, 2015-2016.

MLA William Riley Parker Prize, 2013.

Center for Cultural Analysis Faculty Fellow, Rutgers University, 2013-2014.

American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, 2010-2012.

Roberta C. Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship in Poetry, UC-Berkeley, 2009-2010.