Gabriel Spera

Poet Gabriel Spera was born in Staten Island and grew up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. He earned a BA in English from Cornell University and an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he received the Randall Jarrell Fellowship. Spera is the author of the poetry collections The Rigid Body (2012), winner of the Richard Snyder prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and The Standing Wave (2003), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series and won the PEN Center/USA Literary Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been included in numerous anthologies, such as Literature Across Cultures (2003), The POETRY Anthology 1912–2002, and Best American Poetry 2000.

Spera’s narrative poems are often framed in rhyme and meter and explore natural and domestic themes. In an interview with Brian Brodeur, Spera described his allegiance to honesty over truth, stating, “[O]ne of the virtues of art is that it helps prevent the powerful from rewriting history, from recasting the truth. Documents can be destroyed or manipulated, witnesses can be silenced—but it’s impossible to eradicate a work of art—particularly poetry—once it has found its way into society’s collective imagination.”

Spera’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Intro Award, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a residency at the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Director of Aerospace Press, Spera is currently a technical writer and editor and lives in Los Angeles, California.