Seth Abramson

Writing for The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945, Hank Lazer described Abramson's project as "a daring and data-rich endeavor."

The Missouri Review observed that Abramson, along with novelist Tom Kealey, "had done a tremendous amount of work to peel back the layers of MFA programs and get applicants to make informed decisions."

The data was not without its critics.

Seth Abramson (born October 31, 1976) is an American professor, attorney, author, political columnist, and poet.

He is the editor of the Best American Experimental Writing series and wrote a bestselling trilogy of nonfiction works detailing the foreign policy agenda and political scandals of former president Donald Trump.

Abramson is a graduate of Dartmouth College (1998), Harvard Law School (2001), the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2009), and the doctoral program in English at University of Wisconsin–Madison (2010; 2016).

Abramson was a trial attorney for the New Hampshire Public Defender from 2001 to 2007.

Between 2007 and 2014, Abramson authored The MFA Research Project (MRP), a website that published indexes of creative writing Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs based on surveys and other data.

Indexes appearing on the MRP included ordered listings of program popularity, funding, selectivity, fellowship placement, job placement, student-faculty ratio, application cost, application response times, application and curriculum requirements, and foundation dates.

The MRP also published surveys of current MFA applicants and various creative writing programs.

The Chronicle of Higher Education termed the Poets & Writers national assessment methodology "comprehensive" and "the only MFA ranking regime."

Data from the MRP had been regularly published by Poets & Writers between 2008 and 2013.

In 2011, Publishers Weekly wrote that he had "picked up a very large following as a blogger and commentator, covering poetry, politics, and higher education, and generating a controversial, U.S. News–style ranking of graduate programs in writing."

During the Trump administration, Abramson was a CNN legal analyst.

In September 2011, a critical open letter signed by professors from undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs was published.

Abramson and poet Jesse Damiani have been series co-editor of the annual anthology of innovative verse, Best American Experimental Writing, since its inception with Omnidawn in 2012.

"'After trying for many years to expand his business empire into Russia, Abramson asserts, Trump visited Moscow in 2013 to personally meet agents of Russian President Vladmir Putin, using his beauty pageant as cover. There, Abramson writes, a secret deal was struck: Putin agreed to open up his country's rich real estate market to Trump, and Trump agreed to campaign for president while promoting pro-Russian policies.'"

The series was picked up by Wesleyan University Press in 2014.

Guest editors for the series have included Cole Swensen (2014), Douglas Kearney (2015), Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris (2016), Myung Mi Kim (2018), and Carmen Maria Machado and Joyelle McSweeney (2019).

Abramson became an assistant professor of communication arts and sciences at University of New Hampshire in 2015, and was made affiliate faculty at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2018.

His teaching areas include digital journalism, post-internet cultural theory, post-internet writing, and legal advocacy.

Abramson has written for publications like The Washington Post, Dallas Morning News, The Seattle Times, Newsweek, Indiewire, and The Guardian.

During the 2016 Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Abramson supported Sanders.

He authored what Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine called "a cult-favorite series of Bernie [Sanders] delegate-math fan fiction."

Philip Bump of The Washington Post took issue with Abramson's analyses, calling them "empty theory, unproven...but innovative."

Writing in The Chicago Tribune, Stephen Stromberg called Abramson a "Sanders zealot...[in] reality-denial."

The Atlantic, citing an article by Abramson in which he referred to his writing on the Democratic primary as "experimental journalism," attributed Abramson's articles not to his political leanings but his self-identification as a "metamodernist creative writer."

Politico concurred, referring to Abramson's political commentary as "verses from the abstract."

After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Abramson received widespread attention for his Twitter threads alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and foreign governments, especially Russia, but also Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel.

According to The Washington Post:

In November 2018, Abramson published the New York Times bestselling book Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster), which sought to establish "proof of collusion in the Trump-Russia case."

Kirkus Reviews called the book "spirited, thorough, and thunderously foreboding."

A contrary view appeared in the Herald (Scotland), noting that "suggestive juxtapositions notwithstanding, we end up with something closer to the Scottish 'not proven' verdict with its unique mix of moral conviction of guilt and inability to conclusively prove the case."

A sequel to Proof of Collusion, Proof of Conspiracy, was published by St. Martin's Press in September 2019, and was also a New York Times bestseller.

The final book in the Proof trilogy, Proof of Corruption, was published by St. Martin's Press in September 2020 and was named a USA Today bestseller.

Kirkus Reviews called Proof of Corruption "careful and exhaustive," concluding that it makes a "strong case for Trump's outsized, boundless corruption."

In October 2020, Abramson, former Vice contributing editor Thomas Morton, and Connect3 Media (a division of Cineflix) published a ten-episode, limited-series pre-election podcast, Proof: A Pre-election Podcast Special, to summarize key aspects of the "Proof" book trilogy.

Abramson thereafter launched a Substack publication entitled Proof.

Abramson has published a number of poetry books and anthologies.

Colorado Review called Northerners, Abramson's second collection of poetry, "alternately expansive and deeply personal...of crystalline beauty and complexity," terming Abramson "a major American voice," and Notre Dame Review echoed the sentiment.