Education

B.A. Rhodes College, M.S. Duke University / University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Ph.D. Duke University

Current Courses

HONR 19901: Evolution of Ideas: Vernacular

HONR 29901: Mentors

HONR 19903: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Writing: Small Press Start Up

HONR 19902: Evolution of Ideas: Lyric

HONR 499: Common Poetics

HONR 29900: Print Bay Immersive

Recent Publications

Books

The New Vernacular: Postwar American Poetics and the Limits of Expertise (under review, Duke University Press). Peer-Reviewed Scholarship “The Legacy of Black Mountain.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press (forthcoming, 2025).

“Nathaniel Mackey.” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-First-Century African American Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes and John Kuligowski. Gale, 2023.

“The Variety of Order in Creation: Projective Verse as Vernacular Poetics.” Paideuma 51 (forthcoming).

“ ‘in terrible fruitfulness’: Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death and the Elegiac Southern Avant-Garde.” In Revisiting the Elegy, edited by Tiffany Austin, Darlene Anita Scott, and Sequoia Maner, Routledge, 2020, pp. 81–94.

“Robert Duncan and the Vernacular of Preliteracy.” Sillages critiques 29 (2020).

Essays

“ ‘I cannot repair the rubber scooter all by myself’: English For You, the Dolphin Press Edition.”

In Precious Beetles: Writing on John Yau, edited by Ken Taylor, selva oscura press, 2024, pp. 123–132.

Selected Reviews

“Ed Roberson’s MPH.” Chicago Review 66.2 (2022): 165–171.

Selected poetry and art reviews in Hyperallergic (2019–2020).

Awards and Accolades

2022: Honors College Pillar Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Mentor

2019: Award for Exceptional Teaching and Instructional Support during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Biography

J. Peter Moore is a poet and scholar of modern and contemporary U.S. literature whose work focuses on poetry, poetics, aesthetic theory, and vernacular culture. His research engages questions of informal knowledge production across literary, social-scientific, and material traditions, with particular attention to postwar American poetry and experimental aesthetics.

His academic monograph, The New Vernacular: Postwar American Poetics and the Limits of Expertise (under review at Duke University Press), examines how “the vernacular” emerged as an analytical category in the decades following World War II, tracing its circulation across multiple disciplines and reading this development alongside poetic theories of the vernacular. The project explores competing ideas about expertise, informality, and cultural authority in postwar American thought.

Moore is the author of two poetry collections, Southern Colortype (Three Count Pour, 2013) and Zippers and Jeans (selva oscura, 2017). His current poetry project, VERN, engages the popular comedic character Ernest P. Worrell as a figure for studying regional performance, mediation, and vernacular address. He also directs book design for the small literary press selva oscura.

At Purdue University, Moore founded and directs the university’s first letterpress studio, The Print Bay, which supports teaching and research in print history, book design, and material culture. As a member of the Honors College, he has developed courses informed by his research on postwar vernacular studies, including an interdisciplinary writing course on theories of everyday life, a topics course on radical Black aesthetics, and a letterpress studio practicum focused on the history of the poetry broadside. He also serves as Director of Creative Scholarly Projects in the Honors College, advising students on proposing and completing creative capstone projects.

Contact Info

HCRS 1074
765-494-2843
moore708@purdue.edu

Creative Project Weekly Office Hours:
Wednesday 3-4 PM only by appointment.