Andrew Epstein was born in New York City, grew up in New Jersey, and received his BA in English from Haverford College in 1992. He received his MA and Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 2000. He is currently the Chair of the Department of English at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, where he has been teaching since 2001.  He lives in Tallahassee with his wife, Kara Gross, and their two children.

His research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary poetry and poetics; issues in modernism and postmodernism; theories and practice of the avant-garde; literature and culture of the Cold War and the 1960s; theories and debates about everyday life and twentieth-century writing; and twentieth-century experimental fiction. He is also interested in the inter-relationship between twentieth-century literature and other art forms, especially the visual arts and music, and in the afterlife of nineteenth-century American writing (especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatist philosophy) in post-1900 literature and culture.

He is the author of Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry(Oxford University Press, 2006). His new book, The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945, has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

Epstein is currently editing Frank O’Hara In Context (Cambridge University Press), which will consist of about 40 essays by leading scholars of O’Hara and American poetry, both well-established and emerging.  The book aims to offer an unprecedented, comprehensive understanding of O’Hara’s work, life, and influence by locating him within a wide array of contexts and critical frames.

He has published widely on poetry and 20th- and 21st-century literature, on such topics as the New York School of poets, Language poetry, conceptual poetry, literature and pragmatist philosophy, the Oulipo, and African-American literature, on figures ranging from Shelley and Keats to William James, W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Francis Ponge, Elizabeth Bishop, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, James Schuyler, Rae Armantrout, Stanley Cavell, T. S. Eliot, Lou Reed, and David Berman.

His work has appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Comparative Literature Studies, Jacket2, and Raritan, and in various book collections, including The Cambridge Companion to American Poets, The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature, and Elizabeth Bishop in Context.