Barrett Watten

At 76 years old, Barrett Watten physical status not available right now. We will update Barrett Watten's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

After graduation Watten returned to the San Francisco Bay area. He continued to publish This on his own and became involved in the early stages of language poetry which was developing there. In 1976 he and friends founded a reading series at the Grand Piano coffeehouse in San Francisco which ran through 1979. From 2006 to 2010 the group published The Grand Piano, a "collective autobiography" of that period. Watten continued to edit This until 1982. Then he and Lyn Hejinian founded and edited Poetics Journal from 1982 to 1993.

In 1986 Watten returned to graduate school at Berkeley and received his PhD in English in 1995. He joined the English department at Wayne State University in 1994. In 1995 he was the subject of a special issue of the poetry magazine Aerial. The American Comparative Literature Association awarded him the 2004 René Wellek Prize for his book The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics.

As outlined in a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, over the years Watten's behavior, allegedly short-tempered and hostile, had made many students and faculty uncomfortable. In the spring semester of 2019 several graduate students filed new complaints. Unhappy with the response, they set up a blog to collect accounts of his behavior toward students and faculty. In May the Wayne State administration hired an independent investigator. In November the university informed Watten that he was banned from teaching and his office would be moved to another building. Watten's faculty union, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), filed a grievance citing lack of required due process and requesting that the restrictions be withdrawn.

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