The Poetics of Obsession: Crosswords, Academia, and Department Stores

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them (Penguin Press), Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press), and What Was It For (Rescue Press). Her writing appears in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review, and she has been awarded fellowships at American Library in Paris and the James Merrill House. She holds a PhD from Harvard, an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and an AB from Princeton. Raphel is a Lecturer in the English faculty at CUNY Baruch, where she teaches First-Year Writing and Great Works; and a faculty member at the Writers Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph's University, where she teaches poetry. She is also on faculty with the Berlin Writers' Workshop and serves as a mentor with the Periplus Collective.