Fred Moten

Fred Moten is a professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University concerned with social movement, aesthetic experiment, and Black study. He has written a number of books of poetry and criticism, including In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson's Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the winner of the California Book Award; The Little Edges, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (Wesleyan University Press, 2015); The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016); Black and Blur: consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017); All That Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019); and Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (Wave Books, 2023). 

Black and Blur, the first volume of consent not to be a single being, was awarded honorable mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize by the Modern Language Association and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The second volume of the series, Stolen Life: consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2018), was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.

With Stefano Harney, Moten is coauthor of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2016), and All Incomplete (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2021). With Wu Tsang, he is coauthor of Who touched me? (If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). 

Moten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the African American Literature and Culture Society, a Macarthur Fellowship, and the inaugural Roy Lichtenstein Award of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Moten is a member of Wu Tsang’s performance/cinema troupe Moved By the Motion, whose work been shown or performed at If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam; the Tate Modern, London; and the New Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other venues. Reading Group Records released the album Fred Moten, Brandon López, Gerald Cleaver in 2022. Moten and Laura Harris live in New York City with their children, Lorenzo and Julian.