Renowned UB poetry program in limbo

This story was produced in partnership with The Investigative Post, a local nonprofit news organization. Its reporter J. Dale Shoemaker contributed reporting.

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The University at Buffalo appears to be shuttering its prestigious poetry program, one that has produced prize-winning poets, causing an uproar among students, alumni and the city’s arts community. 

Amid a hiring freeze in the College of Arts and Sciences that dates to the spring of 2024, students allege that university leadership improperly awarded two well-paid positions meant for the Poetics program to English department professors who teach other subjects. 

The two professors that UB temporarily appointed to the endowed chairs, Ruth Mack and Rachel Ablow, both teach British literature. 

This move, several students who spoke to The Spectrum said, led to a loss of funding for Poetics programming, which is now suspended for the fall semester. That includes its semesterly Poetics Plus series that draws in national and international poets, funded publications and a doctoral fellowship. As a result, the Poetics program’s director, Judith Goldman, resigned from that role. She declined to comment for this story. 

The upheaval, the students and professors charge, could end the poetry program’s 35-year history as an important part of Buffalo’s cultural community. Poetics is small, with about 20 graduate students enrolled, but the program has produced Guggenheim Fellows and Pulitzer Prize-winning poets. Without its two chairs, the students argue that the Poetics program is rudderless, cannot attract graduate students and lacks “the support necessary for its survival.”

“Loss of funding and faculty affects our development as scholars and stewards of language,” more than two dozen students wrote in a group statement that was delivered Sept. 10 to Mack, who also chairs the English department. “The narrative, which cannot be controlled by the department, is that the program is already ‘dead,’ due to departmental austerity and disregard.”

English department faculty are also concerned. At a Sept. 28 meeting, professors  — including William Solomon, the former department chair — confronted College of Arts and Sciences Dean Jeffrey Grabill.

“It seems to me if the endowed chairs are locked up for three years … you can't take any graduate students in under those circumstances. And I think the program just dies,” Solomon said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Investigative Post.

Grabill, through an Arts and Sciences spokesperson, told The Spectrum that all protocols were followed in Mack’s and Ablow’s appointments, and that they were through “consideration of an individual’s academic record, qualifications and experiences.”

“There have been inaccuracies shared on social media and mischaracterizations of conversations regarding the Poetics Program,” the emailed statement read.

But at the Sept. 28 meeting, Grabill was blunt.

“If I made a bad decision, I own it,” he told the English department faculty. “If [it’s] the consensus of the department that I blew this one, then I blew it, right? But I'm comfortable with the decision that I made and these are decisions we can make differently in the future.”

Mack and Ablow did not respond to The Spectrum’s requests for comment.

A small but storied program

Poetics, a graduate program within the English department, has been in operation since 1978 and was formally established in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1991 under the leadership of acclaimed poet Robert Creeley, who led the program until his death in 2005. Graduates have gone on to publish numerous books, lead university departments and win major prizes. 

Alumnus Juliana Spahr, now a professor at Mills College in Oakland, California, earned a Pulitzer Prize this year. Spahr, in a statement, said the world will be “lesser” if “the program is killed.” UB’s Poetics is a “rare program that works,” she said.

“It has changed American literature and it should be allowed to continue to do that work,” Spahr wrote. “Someday, someone will write a laudatory history, and if it ends now, that history will have to say who let it end and why.”

What’s more, the students argue, the program is financially self-sufficient. The two leadership positions are paid for via an endowment that also provides additional funding for the program.

A UB spokesperson, in a statement, denied the students’ charges that university leadership is shutting down the program. The program, the spokesperson said, is still a leader in poetics with a legacy of “attracting exceptional writers and advancing the literary arts.” Poetics is still accepting PhD candidates, a university spokesperson noted. 

“Recent claims that the program is inactive are false,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to The Spectrum. 

But for students like Jesse Capobianco, the turmoil in the English department could upend his education. The fourth-year doctoral student moved to Buffalo from Chicago to attend the Poetics program and now faces the prospect it could end before he graduates. 

Transferring out of the program isn’t an option, Capobianco says. 

“Where else would I go?” Capobianco said. “There is no other Poetics program.” 

Atrophy

The Poetics program has been on shaky ground since 2024. 

That was the year poetry professor Tyrone Williams, and one of the program’s two chairs, died of cancer at age 70. The second chair, Myung Mi Kim, retired later that same year.

The College of Arts and Sciences at that point also started its hiring freeze. The two chair positions, though funded by an endowment managed by the UB Foundation, were left vacant for the next two years. The hiring freeze was a way, former-Dean Robin Schulze said, to weather financial losses after lower enrollment revenue failed to match expenses from the rapid expansion of Arts and Sciences faculty.

Funds still remained available from one of the chairs for the Poetics program, and the program’s director, Goldman, was able to draw from it on an interim basis.

That was until August of this year, when Grabill appointed Mack and Ablow on an interim basis. The program then lost control of its budget. Goldman resigned shortly after. She remains an associate professor in the English department, and is the sole advisor to the Poetics graduate students.

At the Sept. 28 meeting, Grabill told faculty that money was still tight in the English department.

“And I'll be really clear, for the next three years, I have no money to invest in any department in [the College of Arts and Sciences],” Grabill said in the recording obtained by Investigative Post. “We've burned through all of the reserve and strategic cash in this college over the last number of years. So it's going to be tight everywhere in this college.”

Solomon, the former English department chair, countered that funding exists in the form of the two chair positions.

“The size of the room has shrunk dramatically in the last five years,” he said. “It's grad students, its faculty. I think it's time to hire in English. We've got the resources.”

The two chair positions pay well. Williams was paid a salary of approximately $170,000 during 2023 and 2024, while Kim was paid a salary of around $138,000, according to payroll data on SeeThroughNY.

Since then, students have raised concerns with UB leadership and word of the program’s “death” has spread on social media platforms. 

The Poetics program, along with the English department as a whole, faces an ongoing hiring freeze, Mack ,the department’s chair, told professors during a meeting on Sept. 14.

Tommy Murter, a Ph.D. student in the Poetics program, spoke on behalf of a group of 27 concerned students who were also in attendance, citing their Sept. 10 statement. 

“The apparent restructuring represents a devastating weakening of Poetics that materially harms graduate students,” Murter said. 

The Buffalo arts community has also gotten involved. Local author Aidan Ryan wrote to UB leadership in mid-September. In reply, Grabill attempted to assuage Ryan’s and the student’s concerns. He argued that “acute financial challenges” persist in the College of Arts and Sciences but that some resources are still available to support Poetics students and programming. 

“We fully expect the program to continue to innovate in Poetics on an international stage, and we value the intellectual community here and elsewhere associated with the program,” Grabill wrote to Ryan in an email The Spectrum obtained. “It is the intention of [the English department] to make sure of that community and goodwill as it works to strengthen that program.” 

Poetics students and faculty confront leadership

A week-and-a-half after the Sept. 14 meeting, which The Spectrum attended, Mack emailed students and faculty that the public should not be invited to a subsequent meeting on Sept. 28 with Grabill, or any English department meeting.

An attendee of that meeting recorded the proceedings, however, and a copy of the recording was shared with reporters.

At the meeting, students and faculty demanded that a hiring process begin “immediately” for two poet-scholars, with the new hires starting in Fall 2027. 

In response, Grabill defended his position to hire Mack and Ablow into the two chair positions and “feigned surprise” — as Poetics graduate student Heather Martin put it — that the Poetics program was so “fragile.”

“If the success and failure of the Poetics program rests on hiring [one of] the chairs, it's even more fragile than I thought it was,” Grabill said. “And it's fragile right now.”

“There’s no faculty,” someone at the meeting retorted.

Grabill replied that it’s up to the English department “to patch this program together in the immediate term.”

Said Martin, in an email to The Spectrum: “Indeed, a program stripped of faculty, infrastructure and funding is fragile.” 

Kaden Zhong is the senior arts editor and can be reached at kaden.zhong@ubspectrum.com.  

Mylien Lai is the editor-in-chief and can be reached at mylien.lai@ubspectrum.com. 

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