Henk Rossouw is from Cape Town, South Africa. His book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor's Prize. An assistant professor, Henk teaches creative writing (poetry) and literature in the English Dept. at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Here is an interview with him as a new faculty member.

The anthology Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Myung Mi Kim, features an excerpt. Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani included his chapbook The Water Archives in the boxset New-Generation African Poets: Tano (African Poetry Book Fund/Akashic Books). Further excerpts of Xamissa are available in Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, and in Blackbird. He also has poems in The Paris Review and Boston Review.

Here’s a poetics essay on Xamissa written for rob mclennan’s blog My (Small) Press Writing Day.

Henk is an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly: Recent editorial work focuses on Emily Hunt, Asiya Wadud, and Daniel Tiffany. A poetry critic, he wrote for Boston Review the essays "Border Lyrics" and "On the Poetry of Institutional Violence". Read his review in Gulf Coast of Fred Moten's The Service Porch.

He was one of the winners of the 2009 Poetry Society of America / Bright Lights Big Verse contest, which included a reading on Times Square. It's on Youtube. 

Older poems are in The Massachusetts Review and Transom. Fiction can be found in Tin House, non-fiction in The Threepenny Review, and an interview with the late Nadine Gordimer in The Virginia Quarterly Review. 

Before joining the faculty at ULL, Henk was a visiting assistant professor in The Honors College at the University of Houston, where he won a teaching award for his lecture on Irish poetry. He has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2017, he earned his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, where he served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast literary journal.

Website: henkrossouw.com

Twitter Username: @henkross

Publications

• Xamissa , Fordham University Press (September 4, 2018)

Awards

• POL Editor's Prize, Fordham University Press(2017)

Employment

• Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast (February 2015 - May 2017)
• Assistant Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at University of Louisiana at Lafayette (August 2018 - )
• Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly (March 2018 - )

Degrees

• Doctoral Degree in Literature and Creative Writing (Poetry) from University of Houston (May 2017)
• Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) from University of Massachusetts Amherst (September 2011)

Genres of Interest

Creative nonfiction, Poetry