Stephanie Burt

An original exploration and celebration of Taylor Swift, the world's biggest music star, as taught at the world's most prestigious university. One of the biggest stars in the world, Taylor Swift became so popular for many reasons - but first and last thanks to her songs. In Taylor's Version, award-winning literary critic Professor Stephanie Burt charts the extraordinary journey from Swift's teen country debut to her most recent record-breaking achievement as the highest-grossing touring artist in the world. Based on her Harvard University course, Taylor Swift and Her World, Burt offers the first serious study of Swift that pays close attention to her talent as a songwriter first and foremost. Drawing from musical and cultural criticism, poetry, economic theory, American history, as well as personal experience, Burt presents an insightful and heartfelt critical appreciation of Swift that delves into her life, her celebrity and her artistry. She explores how Swift's musical and public persona reflect her life and her craft, at once intimate and relatable. She considers the international community Swift's work has fostered, and she shows what makes Swift's body of work so important across styles, genres and generations. Tracing a path through the Eras, Taylor's Version is a literary deep-dive into Swift's particular form of genius, revealing the remarkable impact of her career and showing how her songs - how music itself - can change lives.

An original exploration and celebration of Taylor Swift, the world's biggest music star, as taught at the world's most prestigious university. One of the biggest stars in the world, Taylor Swift became so popular for many reasons - but first and last thanks to her songs. In Taylor's Version, award-winning literary critic Professor Stephanie Burt charts the extraordinary journey from Swift's teen country debut to her most recent record-breaking achievement as the highest-grossing touring artist in the world. Based on her Harvard University course, Taylor Swift and Her World, Burt offers the first serious study of Swift that pays close attention to her talent as a songwriter first and foremost. Drawing from musical and cultural criticism, poetry, economic theory, American history, as well as personal experience, Burt presents an insightful and heartfelt critical appreciation of Swift that delves into her life, her celebrity and her artistry. She explores how Swift's musical and public persona reflect her life and her craft, at once intimate and relatable. She considers the international community Swift's work has fostered, and she shows what makes Swift's body of work so important across styles, genres and generations. Tracing a path through the Eras, Taylor's Version is a literary deep-dive into Swift's particular form of genius, revealing the remarkable impact of her career and showing how her songs - how music itself - can change lives.

Winner of the 2025 New England Book Award for PoetryA major poet and literary critic leads an aesthetic adventure through poems about queer experience, by writers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, trans, nonbinary, gender fluid, and more. A groundbreaking anthology edited by acclaimed poet, critic, and scholar Stephanie Burt, Super Gay Poems brings together fifty-one works encompassing the wide range of queer and trans verse after the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Since that galvanizing moment, poetry has served as both a vehicle for queer liberation and a witness to its sometimes fragile, sometimes ebullient flourishing, across the world. The poems in this anthology represent the great variety of queer and trans life itself. They include near-sonnets, iambic couplets, and rhymed quatrains; skinny dimeters and shaped poems; chatty free verse and intentionally inaccurate translations; the demotic and the rococo. Arranged in chronological order, the selections trace queer culture’s recent evolutions. Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, essa ranapiri, and The Cyborg Jillian Weise—poets widely known and poets who deserve to be—share their alienation, their euphoria, and their encounters with a protean community as it discovers new solidarities and new selves. Each piece is paired with a concise, eye-opening essay in Burt’s trademark style, with verve and an inimitable literary ear. A treasury of aesthetic experience and insight, Super Gay Poems points protestors, political organizers, poetry lovers, and LGBTQIA+ readers toward many beautiful tomorrows.