Reginald Gibbons

Born and raised in Houston, Texas, 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 has published thirteen books of poems including Renditions (Four Way Books, 2021), Last Lake (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press, 2008) a finalist for the National Book Award.

The editor and co-editor of numerous anthologies, including The Poet’s Work (Houghton Mifflin, 1979), Triquarterly New Writers (TriQuarterly Books, 1996), and Writers from South Africa (TriQuarterly, 1994), Gibbons has been represented in Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Gibbons has translated Spanish and Greek poetry and tragedies including Sophocles in Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments (Princeton University Press, 2008). His first novel, Sweetbitter (Broken Moon Press, 1994), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the author of a work of poetics, How Poems Think (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and a collection of short stories, An Orchard in the Street: Stories (BOA Editions Ltd., 2017). 

Gibbons was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997, during which time he co-founded and edited TriQuarterly Books. He also taught creative writing and was a co-founder of the part-time MFA program at Northwestern University where he taught courses in the English, Spanish, and Classics departments. 

Gibbons has been awarded a Fuller Award from the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation from Poetry magazine. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts.