Ketner, Trevor

Trevor Ketner’s chapbooks include Negative of a Photo of Fire, White Combine: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, and Major Arcana: Minneapolis. Ketner has been published in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Brooklyn Rail, New England Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Pleiades, Diagram, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Their essays and reviews can be found in the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary Review. In [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press), Ketner teases out a critique of whiteness in the arts that reflects how we think of whiteness in America. “White is not blank nor is it pure,” Ketner writes. Their work takes inspiration from seeing a retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) seven times and teaching themselves to read tarot. “Ketner’s meditations on Rauschenberg’s multi-faceted work becomes, as well, an examination of racial identity, queerness, and erasure,” notes Forrest Gander, who selected the work as a winner of the National Poetry Series.