Reginald Gibbons

Reginald Gibbons (Ph.D. Stanford University, Comparative Literature), Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities, has published poetry, fiction, translations, and literary criticism. He holds appointments in the departments of English and Classics, and formerly also in the Department Spanish and Portuguese. In September 2015 he published How Poems Think (Chicago), a book about the nature of the temperaments of both poet and language, and about rhyme, apophatic poetics, and continuities of poetic thinking over time. In late 2016, his new book of poems, Last Lake, was published (Chicago), and in Fall 2017, his new book of short fiction, An Orchard in the Street (BOA Editions). In 2010 he published Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories (Chicago); his book of poems, Creatures of a Day (LSU), was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. Also in 2008 he published a volume of new translations of Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments (Princeton).  From 1981 to 1997, he was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine, an international journal of new writing, art and cultural inquiry published at Northwestern; during that time, in addition to general issues of the magazine, he published special issues of writing from South Africa, Spain, Poland and Mexico. He also co-founded and for a time edited TriQuarterly Books, an imprint for contemporary writing at Northwestern University Press. Gibbons was a member of the Content Leadership Team of the new American Writers Museum, which opened in May 2017 at 180 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago.  He continues to serve as a board member of the Guild Literary Complex, a Chicago literary presenting organization that he co-founded in 1989.