Rate My Professor Corey Van Landingham

Corey Van Landingham is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Her academic background includes a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Cincinnati, an MFA in Creative Writing from Purdue University, and a BA from Lewis & Clark College. Van Landingham's research specializations and academic interests focus on creative writing in poetry, including the public poem and poetics, ekphrasis, the long poem, epistolary poetry, and the love poem. Throughout her career, she has held positions advancing poetry and creative writing pedagogy at the university level.

Van Landingham is the author of three poetry collections: Reader, I (Sarabande Books, 2024), which examines marriage, the tension between individuality and partnership, domestic constraints, and new landscapes gained through union; Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens (Tupelo Press, 2022), winner of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize; and Antidote (Ohio State University Press, 2013), recipient of the 2012 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in distinguished publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Colorado Review. She has received major awards and fellowships, including a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship for a poetry project developing a collection on themes of exile, quarantine, isolation, and solitude—inspired by historical events like Venice’s Black Death quarantine and contemporary instances such as forest fire lookouts and the solo migration of wolf OR-7—exploring how seclusion fosters deeper thought amid pervasive noise; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry; and a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellowship from Stanford University. Van Landingham's contributions to poetry through her publications, awards, and teaching exert considerable influence in the field of contemporary American poetry.