Istvan Bio 16
Let's workshop this author bio that will appear alongside the poem "Activist Photographer" in an upcoming edition of the African American Review
M. A. Istvan Jr. is a creative writer, published in over 150 magazines and known for a muscular but elegant verse well aligned with his raspberry-suede signature musk. He is also a former professor, expelled from academia at the due-processless zenith of the 2016-2021 safe-space hysteria for “a record of unsettling poetry prone to activate trauma in vulnerable populations.” His Slavic ferocity and fearlessness, his thirst to polish the hypocrisy-exposing mirror he holds up to beheading heights, has only fiercened in the resultant seclusion. He just finished a first draft of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed, a lyrical essay merging poetry and scholarship in a book-length jeremiad serving to highlight the manifold threats posed especially to black Americans by the humiliating and hobbling and divisive catechisms issuing from a big-money toxicity that hides under the ironic sheepskin of “antiracism.” For daily writing, check out his Substack: maistvanjr.substack.com