michael d. snediker is author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (2009; an MLA First Book finalist) and The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (2013; a Lambda finalist in poetry) and is finishing a book of essays called Contingent Figure: Aesthetic Duress from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. He has been the beneficiary of residencies at Yaddo and the James Merrill House and is associate professor of American literature and poetics at the University of Houston.