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Reginald Gibbons

b. 1947
http://reginaldgibbons.northwestern.edu/

Born and raised in Houston, Reginald Gibbons earned his BA in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, and both his MA in English and creative writing and his PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

Gibbons is the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (1997), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize, Creatures of a Day (2008), finalist for the National Book Award, and Last Lake (2016). In a 2008 interview, Gibbons describes Creatures of a Day as “a book about chance encounters, the testing of one’s sense of the world that is produced by encounters with other people,” a depiction that speaks to one of Gibbons’s major concerns, that of poetry’s role in the lives of others. Over the course of his career, Gibbons has focused increasingly on social and political injustice, and the power and responsibility that writers have to engage their society and effect change. Poet Tony Hoagland describes Gibbons’s recent work as “big, rich, meticulous, thoughtful canvases, social landscapes with personal and metaphysical shadows.”  

He has been awarded the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize and the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Gibbons was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997, during which time he co-founded and edited TriQuarterly Books. He has also been a columnist for The American Poetry Review.

The editor of numerous anthologies, including The Poet’s Work (1979) and Triquarterly New Writers (1996), Gibbons has been represented in Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Gibbons has also published short stories and critical essays as well as translations of Spanish and Mexican poetry and ancient Greek tragedy. His first novel, Sweetbitter (1994), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the author of a work of poetics, How Poems Think (2015) and a collection of short stories, An Orchard in the Street: Stories (2017).

Gibbons has taught at Princeton University, Northwestern University, and Warren Wilson College.

Poems by Reginald Gibbons
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Bibliography

  • (Translator) Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda, University of California Press (Columbia, SC), 1978, reprinted, Sheep Meadow Press, 1999.
  • (Translator, with Anthony L. Geist) Guillén on Guillén, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1979.
  • William Goyen: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Publishers (Boston, MA), 1991.
  • Five Pears or Peaches: Stories, Broken Moon Press (Seattle, WA), 1991.
  • Sweetbitter: A Novel, Broken Moon Press (Seattle, WA), 1994.
  • (Translator, with Charles Segal) Euripides, Bakkhai, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

POETRY

  • Roofs Voices Roads, Quarterly Review of Literature, 1979.
  • The Ruined Motel, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1981.
  • Saints, Persea Books (New York, NY), 1986.
  • Maybe It Was So, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1991.
  • Sparrow: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1997.
  • Homage to Longshot O'Leary: Poems, Holy Cow! Press, 1999.

EDITOR

  • The Poet's Work, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1979, reprinted as The Poet's Work: 29 Poets on the Origins and Practice of Their Art, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1989.
  • (With Gerald Graff) Criticism in the University, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1985.
  • (With Susan Hahn) TQ 20: Twenty Years of the Best Contemporary Writing and Art from TriQuarterly Magazine, Pushcart Press (Yonkers, NY), 1985.
  • The Writer in Our World, Atlantic Monthly Press (Boston, MA), 1986.
  • William Goyen, Had I a Hundred Mouths: New and Selected Stories, 1947-1983, introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, Persea Books (New York, NY), 1986.
  • (With Susan Hahn) Fiction of the Eighties: A Decade of Stories from TriQuarterly, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 1990.
  • New Writing from Mexico, Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), 1992.
  • (With Terrence Des Pres) Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem,University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1992.
  • (And author of afterword) William Goyen, Half a Look of Cain: A Fantastical Narrative, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 1994.
  • TriQuarterly New Writers, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 1996.

Contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic, New Republic, Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and Notre Dame Review.