Gerald William Barrax

A poet of African, Indian, and Dutch ancestry, Gerald William Barrax was born in Attalla, Alabama. When he was 10, his family moved to Pittsburgh. He attended Duquesne University as a pharmacy major, but because he could not afford tuition, he left and joined the US Air Force to fund his education. He wrote poems while stationed in Greenville, South Carolina. After his military discharge, he returned to Duquesne and earned a BA in English in 1963. Barrax later earned an MA in English from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1970, North Carolina State University hired him to teach poetry, and he served on the faculty there for nearly 30 years. He worked as editor of Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review and as poetry editor of Callaloo.

Barrax published five poetry collections: From a Person Sitting in Darkness: New and Selected Poems (1998); Leaning Against the Sun (1992), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods (1984); An Audience of One (1980); and Another Kind of Rain (1970). He received the North Carolina Award for Literature and was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. His other honors include a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Sam Ragan Award, a Raleigh Medal of Arts, and a Callaloo Creative Writing Award for Non-Fiction Prose. He participated in the Furious Flower conference in 1994.

Barrax died in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2019.