Reginald Gibbons

Abbreviated Curriculum Vita

Poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic, artist, professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University, and from 1981 to 1997, the editor of TriQuarterly magazine, an international journal of new writing, art and cultural inquiry published at Northwestern, and also co-founder and an editor of TriQuarterly Books, an imprint for contemporary writing at Northwestern University Press.   Winner of the Folger Shakespeare Library's 2004 O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize and other awards (see below).

Author of eight volumes of poems: Roofs Voices Roads (published in the first volume of the Quarterly Review of Literature poetry series, 1979); The Ruined Motel (winner of the New Poetry Series publication competition; Houghton Mifflin, 1981); Saints (winner of the National Poetry Series publication competition; Persea Books, 1986), Maybe It Was So (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991; winner of the Carl Sandburg Award), Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997; winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize), Homage to Longshot O'Leary (Holy Cow! Press, 1999); It's Time (LSU Press, 2002; winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Best Book of Poetry Prize); Creatures of a Day (forthcoming from LSU Press); and two chapbooks, In the Warhouse (Fractal Edge Press, 2004) and Fern-Texts (Hollyridge, 2005). Also author of short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches (Broken Moon Press, 1991) and a novel, Sweetbitter (Broken Moon Press, 1994; Penguin Books, 1996; LSU Press, 2003); editor of The Poets' Work (Houghton Mifflin, 1979; Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), New Writing from Mexico (TriQuarterly Books, 1992), Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem (with Terrence Des Pres; Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991), Criticism in the University (with Gerald Graff; Northwestern University Press, 1985), Goyen: Autobiographical Essays, Notebooks, Evocations, Interviews (Univ. of Texas Press, 2007), and other books; critic (including William Goyen: A Study of the Short Fiction); translator (two volumes of translation of twentieth-century Spanish poetry by Luis Cernuda [Sheep Meadow, 2000] and Jorge Guillén [Princeton, 1979], plus a translation of Euripides' The Bakkhai [Oxford Univ. Press, 2001] and of Sophokles' Antigone [Oxford, 2003], both with Charles Segal); and textual editor (several works of William Goyen).

In addition to the Hardison Prize, other honors include poetry fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council, and other prizes.  Winner, for Sweetbitter, of the 1995 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and 1995 Jesse Jones fiction award (Texas Institute of Letters). Also winner of the short story award from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carl Sandburg Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library, the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Balcones Poetry Prize, inclusion in Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize , and others. Poetry, fiction, translations, essays, reviews and drawings published in Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, Hudson Review, New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Southern Review, Yale Review, Tikkun, American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Shenandoah, Poetry East, Sewanee Review, Boulevard, Antioch Review, Critical Inquiry, Iowa Review, Ontario Review, American Voice, Southwest Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Callaloo, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Fiction, StoryQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salmagundi, Crazy Horse, Chicago Tribune Magazine, and others. Works reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe, The New Republic, Poetry, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, Choice, The Nation, Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Village Voice Literary Supplement, Bloomsbury Review , and elsewhere.

Has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Columbia and University of Chicago and continues as a member of the core faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Readings, lectures, classes and workshops given at many colleges, universities, research centers, public libraries, and other institutions in the U.S., England, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Panama, Switzerland, and Venezuela. Born in Texas. Public schools; Princeton (AB in Spanish, 1969); Stanford (MA in English and Creative Writing, 1971; PhD in Comparative Literature, 1974).


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