Reginald Gibbons

Frances Hooper Chair in the Arts and Humanities
Professor of English, Classics, Spanish, & Portuguese
Director, Center for the Writing Arts

University Hall Room 404
Telephone: (847) 467-1066
Fax: (847) 467-1545
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Reginald Gibbons' blog posts at
Northwestern's Center for the Writing Arts

Reginald Gibbons (Ph.D. Stanford University, Comparative Literature) is a poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic, artist, and Professor of English, Classics, and Spanish and Portuguese.  In 2011-12, he was a (short-term) Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard) in Washington D.C.  In 2010 he published Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories (Univ. of Chicago); his book of poems, Creatures of a Day (LSU Press, 2008), was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.  In 2008 he also published a volume of new translations of Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments (Princeton).  He has been a columnist for American Poetry Review.  From 1981 to 1997, he served as the editor of TriQuarterly magazine, an international journal of new writing, art and cultural inquiry published at Northwestern; during that time, in addition to general issues of the magazine, he published special issues of writing from South Africa, Spain, Poland and Mexico. He also co-founded and edited TriQuarterly Books, an imprint for contemporary writing at Northwestern University Press.  

His poetry publications include two chapbooks, In the Warhouse (Fractal Edge, 2004) and Fern-Texts (Hollyridge, 2005), and eight full-length collections, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (LSU 1997), Homage to Longshot O'Leary (Holy Cow! Press 1999), and It's Time (LSU, 2002).  He has published a collection of short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches (Broken Moon Press 1991); a novel Sweetbitter (Penguin 1996); and other works. He has translated Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda (California, 1977; reprint Sheep Meadow Press, 1999); Guillén on Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet (with A. L. Geist; Princeton, 1979); Euripides' Bakkhai (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) and Sophocles' Antigone (Oxford, 2003), both of the latter with Charles Segal.  He has edited The Poet's Work, (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989) and, with Gerald Graff, Criticism in the University (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1985). Gibbons has also published numerous essays and reviews, has been a columnist for American Poetry Review, has won Guggenheim and NEA fellowships in poetry, and the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, the Carl Sandburg Prize, the Folger Shakespeare Library's 2004 O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, and other honors, among them the inclusion of his work in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Other publications include an edited collection of the autobiographical writings of William Goyen, Goyen: Autobiographical Essays, Notebooks, Evocations, Interviews (University of Texas Press and the Harry Ransom Center, 2007), a bilingual Spanish edition of poems, Desde una barca de papel, edited by Jordi Doce (Villanueva de la Serena [Spain]: Littera Libros, 2010), and a bilingual Italian edition of poems, L'Abitino Blu, translated by Piera Mattei (Rome: Gattomerlino/Superstripes, 2012).  His current projects include a work on twentieth-century and contemporary Russian poetry, co-authored with Ilya Kutik, including essays and translations; and a book of essays on poetry.  Gibbons teaches poetry, fiction, and literature courses in English, Classics and Comparative Literary Studies.

The Poetry & Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern University

Publications by Reginald Gibbons

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