University of Dallas Assistant Professor of English Sarah Berry aims to explain the 21st-century resurgence of Anglophone verse drama in her new book, Staging the Lyric: Modern and Contemporary Experiments with Verse Drama (Bloomsbury, 2024). This modern verse drama differs from its ancient and Elizabethan antecedents as it is understood not as a genre in its own right, but as a hybrid of the lyric and the dramatic. While they differ in their ideology and form, Berry contends that they are united by exploring the relationship between lyric and dramatic elements on stage and what these two different modes afford. To demonstrate this continuity, Staging the Lyric traces a genealogy from contemporary plays by Joanna Laurens, Joyelle McSweeney, and David Grieg back to W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, to reveal that the tensions that animate verse drama have stayed the same, even as the strategies for staging them have evolved. Berry graduated from Boston College with a master’s degree in English in 2012. She has published articles in Literature/Film Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature, Christianity and Literature, and Twentieth Century Literature as well as reviews in Modern Drama and Modernism/Modernity.