Gabriel Gudding

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Gabriel Gudding (born June 16, 1966) is an American poet and essayist.

Life[]

Gudding was born in a Norwegian-American part of northwestern Minnesota.

Gudding attended The Evergreen State College, an experimental school in Olympia, Washington, Purdue University and Cornell University. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois where he was hired to teach poetry writing and poetics. His work has been translated into French, Danish, Vietnamese and Spanish.

Gudding has given over 80 poetry readings and lectures in Europe, the Caribbean, and America. He has published over a hundred poems and essays in periodicals such as Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, and The Journal of the History of Ideas. He is the author of two books, A Defense of Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press), which won the 2001 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and, Rhode Island Notebook (Dalkey Archive Press), a 436 page poem he wrote in his car. His poetry appears in twenty anthologies, including &Now: Best Innovative Writing (2010), Best American Poetry (Scribner 2010) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner).

His translations from Spanish appear in anthologies such as The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (Oxford UP), Poems for the Millennium (University of California Press), and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press)

Gudding has a daughter named Clio. Gudding practices vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin (as taught by S.N. Goenka).^[1]

Writing[]

Gudding's second book of poetry, Rhode Island Notebook, was published in November 2007 by Dalkey Archive Press. Rhode Island Notebook is a four hundred thirty-six page poem interlarded with essays. It was written in Gudding's car on the highways between Normal, Illinois, and Providence, Rhode Island, during twenty-six roundtrip journeys, and has been called by the polymathic writer and artist Alan Sondheim, "the first 21st Century classic."

Recognition[]

A recipient of The Nation Discovery Award, Gudding received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Pitt Poetry Series for his first book A Defense of Poetry.