Gavin Geoffrey Dillard | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | November 28, 1954 |
| Occupation | Author, poet |
Gavin Geoffrey Dillard (born November 28, 1954) is an American poet and songwriter. He is the author of nine books of verse, two poetry anthologies, a memoir, numerous popular and classical art songs. He wrote many of the lyrics for Bark! The Musical . An award-winning opera, When Adonis Calls, is composed entirely of Dillard’s poetry. [1]
Dillard was born in Asheville, North Carolina, on November 28, 1954. He was in the high school program at the North Carolina School of the Arts and also attended California Institute of the Arts. His first chapbook of poetry, Twenty Nineteen Poems, was published by Ian Young's Catalyst Press when Dillard was 20 years old.
During the late 1970s, Dillard lived in Hollywood, California, and his experiences there figured heavily in his autobiography, In the Flesh: Undressing for Success, published in 1997 by Barricade Books. Dillard's portraits have been drawn by Tom of Finland and Don Bachardy. Photos of Dillard have appeared in Playgirl and many gay publications.
Dillard is the author of nine books of homoerotic poetry, the first of which was published when he was 20. Dillard collected and published two anthologies of gay poetry, Between the Cracks, and A Day for a Lay: A Century of Gay Poetry. Many of Dillard's private letters, notes, and files were donated by Dillard to the Gay and Lesbian Archives of the San Francisco Public Library.
Dillard wrote many of the lyrics for Bark! The Musical . His songwriting work (as lyricist) also includes "The Rescue," recorded by Sam Harris and Janis Ian, and art songs set to music by composers Jake Heggie, Clint Borzoni, Glen Roven. Dillard wrote book and lyrics for OMFG!!! – an iLove Story, which opened at the ODC Theater in San Francisco on July 8, 2011. The music was written by Christopher Winslow. When Adonis Calls is a new opera composed by Clint Borzoni with a libretto created by John de los Santos entirely from the poetry of Gavin Dillard. The opera won "best new work" laudits from both Fort Worth Opera's "Frontiers," as well as OPERA America. When Adonis Calls officially premiered with the Asheville Lyric Opera in Asheville, NC, on May 11, 2018. [2]
Lyrics are words that make up a song, usually consisting of verses and choruses. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist. The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as a "libretto" and their writer, as a "librettist". The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of expression. Rappers can also create lyrics that are meant to be spoken rhythmically rather than sung.
Ali Ahmad Said Esber, also known by the pen name Adonis or Adunis, is a Syrian poet, essayist and translator. He led a modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, "exerting a seismic influence" on Arabic poetry comparable to T.S. Eliot's in the anglophone world.
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
George Moses Horton, "the Black bard of North Carolina", was an African-American poet from North Carolina who was enslaved. His first collection, The Hope of Liberty (1829), was intended to earn enough to purchase his freedom, but failed to do so. He did not become free until 1865, when Union troops and the Emancipation Proclamation reached North Carolina.
Gavin Buchanan Ewart was a British poet who contributed to Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse at the age of seventeen.
Pierre Joris is a Luxembourg-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He has moved between Europe, North Africa & the US for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Fox-trails, -tales & -trots: Poems & Proses, the translations Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG) & Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan (CMP) & A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly. Earlier, Arabia Deserta, Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis, & The Book of U/ Le livre des cormorans.
David Leo is a writer in Singapore. Leo received a Publishers Prize for Ah … The Fragrance of Durians & Other Stories in 1993, a (Singapore) National Book Department Council Book Awards for works in English in 1994 for The Sins of the Father and Singapore Literature Prize commendation in 1995 for Wives, Lovers and Other Women.
Essex Hemphill was an openly gay American poet and activist. He is known for his contributions to the Washington, D.C. art scene in the 1980s, and for openly discussing the topics pertinent to the African-American gay community.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
— closing lines of Rudyard Kipling's If—, first published this year
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
David Brendan Hopes is an American author, playwright, and poet. He is a professor of literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Christopher Whyte is a Scottish poet, novelist, translator and critic. He is a novelist in English, a poet in Scottish Gaelic, the translator into English of Marina Tsvetaeva, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Maria Rilke, and an innovative and controversial critic of Scottish and international literature. His work in Gaelic also appears under the name Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin.
Homoerotic poetry is a genre of poetry implicitly dealing with same-sex romantic or sexual interaction. The male-male erotic tradition encompasses poems by major poets such as Abu Nuwas, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, W. H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa and Allen Ginsberg. In the female-female tradition, authors may include those such as Sappho, "Michael Field", "Marie-Madeleine" and Maureen Duffy. Other poets wrote poems and letters with homoerotic overtones toward individuals, such as Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.
Croatian literature refers to literary works attributed to the medieval and modern culture of the Croats, Croatia, and Croatian. Besides the modern language whose shape and orthography was standardized in the late 19th century, it also covers the oldest works produced within the modern borders of Croatia, written in Church Slavonic and Medieval Latin, as well as vernacular works written in Čakavian and Kajkavian dialects.
BARK! The Musical is a musical with music by David Troy Francis and lyrics by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard and Robert Schrock. The book is by Mark Winkler and Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.
George Frederick Cameron was a Canadian poet, lawyer, and journalist, best known for the libretto for the operetta Leo, the Royal Cadet.
Diann Blakely was an American poet, essayist, editor, and critic. She taught at Belmont University, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, led workshops at two Vermont College residencies, and served as senior instructor and the first poet-in-residence at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee. A "Robert Frost Fellow" at Bread Loaf, she was a Dakin Williams Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference at which she had worked earlier as founding coordinator.
Han poetry as a style of poetry resulted in significant poems which are still preserved today, and which have their origin associated with the Han dynasty era of China, 206 BC – 220 AD, including the Wang Mang interregnum. The final years at the end of the Han era often receive special handling for purposes of literary analysis because, among other things, the poetry and culture of this period is less than typical of the Han period, and has important characteristics of its own, or it shares literary aspects with the subsequent Three Kingdoms period. This poetry reflects one of the poetry world's more important flowerings, as well as being a special period in Classical Chinese poetry, particularly in regard to the development of the quasipoetic fu; the activities of the Music Bureau in connection with the collection of popular ballads and the resultant development of what would eventually become known as the yuefu, or as the rhapsodic formal style; and, finally, towards the end of the Han Dynasty, the development of a new style of shi poetry, as the later development of the yuehfu into regular, fixed-line length forms makes it difficult to distinguish in form from the shi form of poetic verse, and at what point specific poems are classified as one or the other is somewhat arbitrary. Another important poetic contribution from the Han era is the compilation of the Chuci anthology, which contains some of the oldest and most important poetic verses to be preserved from ancient China, as well as the transmission of the Shijing anthology.