Reflections by Chris Abani
Reginald Gibbons is my friend, and friend to many in the department – faculty and students alike. This is no small achievement: to be brilliant and accomplished and yet to be valued for the humanity you embody. Reginald Gibbons is in large part responsible for me being at Northwestern – for better or for worse. I first met Reginald in 2003, when Brian Bouldrey invited me to speak at Northwestern. I must have made a deep enough impression because Reginald invited me back in 2009, as part of the Center for the Writing Arts’ Visiting Writers initiative. I bring this up to speak to Reginald’s intentionality and commitment to the communities he chooses to be part of as he sought to bring more international writers and a more global presence to Northwestern than ever before and ever since. The purpose of all Center for the Writing Arts activities was to create, support and further undergraduate and graduate opportunities for the study of writing at Northwestern, both within CWA itself and across the university; to facilitate a continuing discussion in the university community about how best to foster and situate writing as a crucial part of a university education; to help coordinate the university’s multifarious courses and programs in writing across departments, programs and schools; and also to welcome audiences from the metropolitan area to the rich array of public events on campus that are focused on writing. In the time he ran the center, before he helped fold it into the Litowitz MFA+MA program, and in fact, over the course of his career, Reginald has focused increasingly on social and political injustice, and the power and responsibility that writers have to engage their society and effect change, and he has tried to embody this in his service, writing and teaching.
Reginald brought the same global perspective and focus to TriQuarterly, the journal he came to Evanston to take to new heights, and he did just that. It continues, over two decades later, to grow and remain international and to attract over 50k visitors a month in its online form. Reginald is the mastermind behind the School of Professional Studies’ MFA program, and simultaneously a core founder of the Litowitz MFA+MA in the English Department. In all of this, community, with students at the center, has been Reginald’s focus. And yet, while giving in service, he remained a scholar, translator, novelist, essayist, editor, and poet.
Reginald is the author of eleven books collections of poetry, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (1997), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize, Creatures of a Day (2008), finalist for the National Book Award, and Last Lake (2016), and he will be publishing two more books of poetry in 2024 and 2025. In a 2008 interview, Gibbons describes Creatures of a Day as “a book about chance encounters, the testing of one’s sense of the world that is produced by encounters with other people,” a depiction that speaks to one of Reginald’s major concerns, that of poetry’s role in the lives of others. The facing page displays a selection of Reginald’s published works as both author and translator.
The editor of numerous anthologies, including The Poet’s Work (1979) and Triquarterly New Writers (1996), Reginald has been represented in Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has also published short stories, critical essays, as well as translations of Spanish and Mexican poetry and ancient Greek tragedy. His first novel, Sweetbitter (1994), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the author of a work of poetics, How Poems Think (2015) and a collection of short stories, An Orchard in the Street: Stories (2017). Reginald was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997, during which time he co-founded and edited TriQuarterly Books. He has also been a columnist for The American Poetry Review.
Born and raised in Houston, Reginald 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. Before coming to Northwestern, Reginald taught Creative Writing at Columbia University and Spanish at Rutgers and Princeton. He taught English to immigrant children from Puerto Rico at both a “street academy” in Trenton NJ and at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. He has been awarded the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize and the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the recipient of the Chicago-based Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.