Reginald Gibbons

rdf:langString Reginald Gibbons

rdf:langString Reginald Gibbons (born 1947) is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic. He is a Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Gibbons has published numerous books, as well as poems, short stories, essays, reviews and art in journals and magazines, has held and NEA fellowships in poetry and a research fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. For his novel, Sweetbitter, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; for his book of poems, Maybe It Was So, he won the . He has won the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, and other honors, among them the inclusion of his work in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His book Creatures of a Day was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for poetry. His other poetry books include (Balcones Prize), and , his eleventh book of poems. His has also published two collections of very short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches and . Gibbons was born in Houston, Texas, and first attended public school in Houston before entering the Spring Branch independent school district (at that time, outside Houston, Texas; now inside Houston's boundaries). He received an AB in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, and an MA in English and creative writing and a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. Before moving to Northwestern University to direct TriQuarterly Magazine, he taught Spanish at Rutgers and creative writing at Princeton and Columbia University. At Northwestern, he was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997, and co-founded TriQuarterly Books (after 1997, an imprint of Northwestern University Press). As the editor of TriQuarterly, he edited or co-edited the special issues Chicago (1984), From South Africa: New Writing, Photography and Art (1987), A Window on Poland (1983), Prose from Spain (1983), The Writer in Our World (a symposium of writers including Derek Walcott, Grace Paley, Robert Stone, C.K. Williams, Gloria Emerson, Carolyn Forche, Michael S. Harper, Mary Lee Settle, Ward Just, and others) (1986), Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem (1987), Writing and Well-Being (1989), New Writing from Mexico (1992), and others, as well as many general issues of the magazine. (See the complete digitized ISSUE ARCHIVE at [1]). As the executor of the literary estate of William Goyen (1915–1983), Gibbons edited four works of Goyen: a posthumous volume of short stories, Had I a Hundred Mouths: New & Selected Stories 1947-1983 (Clarkson Potter, 1985; Persea Books, 1986); Goyen's posthumously published second novel, Half a Look of Cain (Northwestern University Press, 1998); a 50th-Anniversary restored edition of The House of Breath (Northwestern University Press, 2000); and a collection of nonfiction prose, Goyen: Autobiographical Essays, Notebooks, Evocations, Interviews (University of Texas Press / Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series, 2007). In 1989, Gibbons was one of a group of co-founders of the Guild Literary Complex (Chicago), a literary presenting organization (as of 2019 he is an emeritus board member). He was also a member of the Content Leadership Team that helped create the American Writers Museum (Chicago), and he remains on the national advisory board of the museum. At Northwestern University, he is a former director of the Center for the Writing Arts, a faculty member of the Departments of English (which he chaired in 2002–2005) and Classics, a former director of graduate studies of the Litowitz Graduate Creative Writing Program (MFA+MA), a member of the Core Faculty of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, and a former member of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.