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Spencer Dew

Spencer Dew is the author of Songs of Insurgency (Vagabond Press, 2008), Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Another New Calligraphy, 2010), and the critical study Learning for Revolution: The Work of Kathy Acker (San Diego State University Press, 2011). His first novel, Maintain, is forthcoming from Ampersand Books (April, 2012).

Dew is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. A regular reviewer for Rain Taxi Review of Books, and a Staff Book Reviewer for decomP magazine, his fiction and essays have appeared in scores of publications, including art reviews in Newcity Chicago and Chicago Artists' News. He is currently completing a manuscript on religious understandings of writing in the work of Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and James Baldwin, and, thanks to a research fellowship from the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, beginning work on a study of the history of the Moorish Science Temple of America and, in particular, conceptions of nationality within that movement.

News / Essays

Spencer Dew's "Best of 2011" list for Karen the Small Press Librarian's "Best of the Small Press 2011"

New Spencer Dew short story, "The Process of Discovery" at TriQuarterly.

Spencer Dew quoted in USA Today on Moorish Science.

Spencer Dew on the Almighty Black P-Stone Nation--gangs, religion, and the law.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is available now. For my thoughts on the book, check out this little essay (at decomP). Cynthia Reeser review Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres at Prick of the Spindle.

Spencer Dew on astrology and car insurance.

Spencer Dew on sovereign citizen ideology and the religion of Moorish Science.

New reviews: Spencer Dew on Tocqueville in America and Mircea Eliade in Portugal.

Spencer Dew on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's hatred of Islam and fetishization of Christianity.

Spencer Dew on the ethical problematic of Jack Kerouac's theology.

Recent reviews: Spencer Dew on Troika Ranch's loopdiver, the work of Jack Smith, new fiction from Helen Oyeyemi, the reception of contemporary Muslim theologian Tariq Ramadan, the dramatic trajectory of the Nutcracker, and the problem of racism in the history of American/Haitian relations.

Reviews of Songs of Insurgency

Hipster Book Club: "These three- to ten-page stories are meant to be savored like bitter chocolate."

Tarpaulin Sky: "It's about cliche. And saturation. And how our perceptions as Western readers and intellectuals cannot easily be divorced from the media in which we live."

St Louis Post-Dispatch: "Spencer Dew pounds through the apathy and delusions of our post-9/11 world with the force of a jackhammer.... In their rawness and brevity, the stories send up a flare from the accident scene of our world.... The world is not all right, and these characters aren't going to pretend that it is."

Time Out Chicago: "In his 23 sharp, poignant shorts, Chicago writer Spencer Dew lays out a terrifying post-September 11th world.... His book hits like a sock to the gut..."

Mark Baumer of Everyday Yeah: "I wanted to eat every page after I read it"

Ian Wood at Write Bastard: "Dew has deliberately separated himself from the black and white political orthodoxy which infects so much of the creative class in the post 9-11 American sphere."

David Erlewine at The Short Review: "Spencer Dew's Songs of Insurgency is hysterical and heartbreaking, often brutally dark, rife with unhealthy sex, failures to connect, fetishes, injuries, and death."

Mark Peacock Brush of Wandering Army in The Mile Hive: "The writing is roundly poetic, but never without purpose, and never without some tragic story to tell. Dew writes about human difficulty, and leaves it difficult."

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