Gibbons, Reginald

Biography

Award winning poet, editor, and professor, Reginald Gibbons was born in Houston on January 7, 1947, to a mother whose parents had emigrated from “Russian Poland” to the U.S. in 1901 and a father born in Mississippi of Irish-Choctaw descendance. Gibbons attended public schools in an area that was during his childhood and youth outside the Houston city limits. In 1969, he graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with a BA in Spanish and Portuguese and won the Morris Croll Prize in Poetry. Gibbons proceeded to Stanford, where he graduated with an MA in English and Creative Writing in 1970, and then, in 1974 a PhD in Comparative Literature, studying poetry from 1850 to 1950 in Romance Languages and English. His dissertation, supervised by the English poet and critic Donald Davie (then a professor at Stanford), was a volume of translations of poems by the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), with a lengthy introductory essay on Cernuda’s work and on this poet’s affinity with English poetry; his dissertation was published by Univ. of California Press. Between 1975 and 1981, Gibbons taught Spanish at Rutgers University and creative writing at Princeton University and Columbia University.

Gibbons came to Northwestern having been appointed the editor of TriQuarterly in 1981 and a lecturer in English literature and creative-writing classes. In 1986 he was made a full professor (however, without tenure) in the English Dept. After he left TriQuarterly in 1997, he was tenured and then was awarded a Frances Hooper Endowed Chair in Arts and Humanities. He was an affiliate and voting faculty member of the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese and also the Dept. of Classics, and taught a few courses in those departments. He also taught classes the Center for Humanities and Comparative Literary Studies, as well as lectures/seminars for the Continuing Education Series. He also served for nine years as Director of the Center for the Writing Arts (a Provost’s Unit). He also founded and co-directed the part-time MFA in creative writing in Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies; much later, with creative writing colleagues in the English Dept., he co-founded the Litowitz MFA+MA Graduate Program in Creative Writing. In 2023 he retired from Northwestern.

Gibbons is an accomplished poet, having published eleven books of poems, a novel, and many other books authored, translated, or edited, throughout his career. His book of poems Creatures of a Day was a Finalist for the National Book Award. His novel Sweetbitter won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (which “recognizes books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity”), the Best Novel award from the Texas Institute of Letters (from which he also received awards for Best Short Story, Best Book of Poetry Translation, and Best Book of Poetry, over several years), and Balcones Award (Austin Community College), and other literary prizes and honors.

While editor of TriQuarterly, Northwestern’s international journal of new creative writing, and essays, and works translated into English, Gibbons also reviewed for the literary magazine, and compiled several special issues focusing on writing from South Africa, Spain, Poland, Mexico, and writers of Chicago. While working as editor, Gibbons also co-founded TriQuarterly Books, which later became an imprint of Northwestern Books, published contemporary works of fiction and poetry. Due to his editorial position, Gibbons was a member of the Illinois Literary Publishers Association (ILPA). Gibbons helped migrate TriQuarterly from being a hard-copy journal to an online one. Triquarterly.org now publishes new issues online, and also provides readers with a complete digitized run of the print magazine from its first issue as a student publication in 1958 to its first as a national and international literary magazine to its last issue as a hard-copy journal.

Gibbons' first poems were published in a campus literary magazine he co-founded at Princeton, Upstart—to rival the existing student magazine, The Nassau Literary Review—and then in the annual prize anthology Story (now defunct) in 1969. Later publications include more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism (notably How Poems Think [Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015] and Criticism in the University [Northwestern Univ. Press, 1985, co-edited with NU professor Gerald Graff); edited books include a collection of the fiction writer William Goyen's autobiographical writings (Univ of Texas Press, 2007); individual critical essays and reviews; and poetry chapbooks (including In the Warhouse, 2004, and Fern-Texts, 2005), two collections of “flash fiction” short stories, and other books. He was a columnist for American Poetry Review. Gibbons' published works have won him a number of literary prizes and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, The Denver Quarterly translation award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a short-term fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington DC—a Classics outpost of Harvard), a National Poetry Series competition (which led to the publication of his poetry book Saints), an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for poetry, prize publication in the Pushcart Prize annual anthologies and in Best American Poetry anthologies, the Carl Sandburg Award (from the Chicago Public Library), and other prizes, awards and fellowships. His work has been reviewed in the New Times, New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, The New Republic, Boston Globe, Poetry, Booklist, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, The Nation, Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Poetry Review and elsewhere. Gibbons also had several drawings published throughout his career.

Beginning in 1986, Gibbons held a continuing position for a number of years as a core faculty member for the 10-day residencies of Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers. He also taught an undergraduate creative writing workshop at the University of Chicago, as has given readings, lectures and readings, classes, and creative writing workshops at over a hundred universities in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Gibbons is married to Cornelia Spelman, a former social worker, therapist and author of children's books and memoirs.

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