Hannah Warren

Name:

Hannah V Warren

MSU Degree:

         BA in English, Minor in History, 2016

Any other degrees:

MFA in Creative Writing, University of Kansas, 2019

PhD in Literature, Creative & Critical Dissertation, University of Georgia, 2024    

Favorite memories of being an undergraduate English major:

Two English Major memories shape who I am as a writer and scholar: my first poetry course with Catherine Pierce and my study abroad at the University of Oxford. That poetry course altered all my plans for the future, sweeping me toward a love for language and form that resonates so deeply now. Though I came to State with plans to write novels, I read Natasha Trethewey’s poetry and realized I had permission to write about own background—a first-generation student from a working-class family in Mississippi—and this writing could be beautiful and grotesque and lyrical and whatever else I wanted it to be. I started writing poetry and never stopped. When trying to decide what would come of my time at Oxford, I chose to continue working on creative writing. I’d never been on a plane before, much less to another continent; everything was new. I learned more about myself as a person during that summer than I had in the previous decade. And these memories follow me. During my PhD, I helped lead a study abroad program back in Oxford where I watched my own students learn to fall in love with poetry. A full circle, a rendering.

Current Position & Organization:

The Kenyon Review Fellow at Kenyon College

When you graduated with a degree in English from MSU, what were your plans for your future?  Has your career path mostly realized those early plans, or have you discovered new plans and goals along the way?

I left MSU with a twenty-two-year-old’s desire to do and see miraculous things. From the outside, my path probably seems linear: MFA, PhD, first book. But it’s been a little more circuitous than I planned. During my PhD, I fluttered among research and writing interests, trying to take hold of them all as they waterfalled around me. I started composing more personal work, and theoretical research became much more important to me as a lens through which I could convey these experiences. I learned to combine my love for writing with my love for critical work, making my poetry much weirder than I ever intended. I thought I’d come out of graduate school and work directly toward a tenure-track job, but I wanted more time to write, more time to learn about myself outside the university. In the year following my doctoral graduation, I trained as a naturalist, which in turn influenced my writing. I never expected I’d rejoin academia in a fellowship position and teach Science and Nature Writing classes, but as I prepare my syllabus for next semester, my desk boasts an eclectic and interdisciplinary pile of books: Ecology in a Changing World, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, and Silent Spring. This is all to say, I’ve seen miraculous things, yes, but not the ones I expected.

What is your current occupation, and what does your work mostly consist of?

I’m currently at the end of my first year of a two-year fellowship with The Kenyon Review at Kenyon College. Here, I teach a creative writing course every semester and work with one of America’s most well-known and -established literary journals. Mostly, I’m working on my own creative projects, two poetry manuscripts and a novel. As a working writer, I’m always on my way to or from a conference or a reading or a literary festival. I don’t think I realized when I was younger how often writers are on the road between here and there. It’s a wonderful whirlwind that includes exhaustion. I’ve started transitioning from reading selections from my first book, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales (2024), to sharing pieces from my forthcoming collection Hurricane Pastoral, which is coming out in January 2027 from Sundress Publications. It’s a thrilling moment!

Which skills that you learned as an English major do you use most in your job?

Self-motivated research. Though I also produce critical scholarship, research plays a fundamental role in my creative work. In Fall 2025, I taught a class on archives-based creative writing, and we expanded our ideas of what composes an archive, exploring not only special collections, but also the college’s nature preserve, local graveyards, art museums, and more. Being a writer means having the ability to nurture expertise in any and every subject, from evolutionary biology to demonology.

What additional skills did you need to learn in order to do your job, and how did you learn them?

When I realized Gothic literature formed the backbone of my research in sublime aesthetics, I confronted the fact that I needed to learn German and learn it quick. Language acquisition doesn’t come easy to me, but I knew, if I wanted to connect the German Gothic to the Southern Gothic, I needed to lock in. In my PhD, I took German courses during my second year and throughout my comprehensive exams year, and it was brutal. When I applied for the Fulbright to work on my dissertation, I knew my German was still shoddy, and I quickly discovered the most important skill I learned during this process wasn’t the language, itself, but learning to find comfort in being very very bad at something. While living in the German Black Forest, I joked to friends that it was freeing, for the first time in my life, to be a little inept in every situation, to blunder through registering my address with the city or ordering a falafel sandwich in the shade of a cathedral. After a few months living in southwest Germany, I fell in love with this language and all its little rules. Now, I translate German poetry into English. The complications of dissecting long German nouns lead to baffling and often absurd conversations with fellow translators and friends. This work has become another part of my job. Vital to my work at Kenyon, I lead a Poetry in Translation group, and we dig deep into the trenches of translation theory and experimentation, an experience I never would have gained without discomfort and a willingness to learn something incredibly difficult.

In what ways does your career enrich your life and help you to achieve your personal as well as your professional goals?

Because my career is art-centered, my personal and professional lives blend into something quite indistinguishable. When I plant native flowers with my husband, Latin plant names weave into my poetry. When I research cemeteries for a new writing project, my friends and family follow me in and out of graveyards, pointing out lichen, insects, and names I’d otherwise miss. When we’re far apart, people I love send pictures of graves they think I might find interesting. It all sweeps together. My writing is usually research- and location-based: I need to see something to write something. Currently, I’m working on an experimental poetry project linking Sylvia Plath’s work to automaton theory. To better understand Plath’s oeuvre, I spent a week in her archives at Smith College, and I’m devoting the bulk of my 2026 summer following in her footsteps across England, France, and Spain. Because her poetry is place-based, my research must contain an aspect of visualization, as well. While I’ll spend a few days in the British Library archives, I’ll pass most days following Plath’s ghost along European coastlines, through medieval cities, and across the moors. My career as a writer has not only enriched my life—it has swallowed my life, and I’m delighted.

What advice do you have for undergraduate English majors right now who might want to follow the career path you did?

No one else will take you seriously until you do. Apply to everything. Go outside. Put good into the world. Make community with other writers and embrace generosity.

[Updated May 2026]