Reginald Gibbons is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic, and Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University and Director of the Center for the Writing Arts there. Gibbons has published numerous books, as well as poems, short stories, essays and reviews in journals and magazines, has held Guggenheim Foundation 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 Carl Sandburg Prize. 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. Gibbons was born in Houston, Texas and attended public school in Houston and in the Spring Branch independent school district. 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, he taught Spanish at Rutgers and then creative writing at Princeton and Columbia. At Northwestern, he was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997, and co-founded TriQuarterly Books. As the editor of TriQuarterly, he edited or co-edited the special issues Chicago, From South Africa: New Writing, Photography and Art, A Window on Poland, Prose from Spain, The Writer in Our World , Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem, Writing and Well-Being, New Writing from Mexico, and others, as well as many general issues of the magazine.. As the executor of the literary estate of William Goyen, Gibbons edited four works of Goyen: a posthumous volume of short stories, Had I a Hundred Mouths: New & Selected Stories 1947-1983 ; Goyen's posthumously published second novel, Half a Look of Cain ; a 50th-Anniversary restored edition of The House of Breath ; and a collection of nonfiction prose, Goyen: Autobiographical Essays, Notebooks, Evocations, Interviews. In 1989, Gibbons was one of a group of co-founders of the Guild Literary Complex, a literary presenting organization. He was also a member of the Content Leadership Team that helped create the American Writers Museum, and remains on the National Advisory Board of the museum. At Northwestern University, he is a Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities. He is a former Director of the Center for the Writing Arts, a current faculty member of the Departments of English and Classics, a member of the Core Faculty of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, and a former member of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Career
Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities Northwestern University
