George Bilgere (born 1951) is an American poet.
Bilgere grew up in Riverside, California, and earned his BA at the University of California, Riverside. He received his MA in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis and earned a Ph.D. in contemporary British and American Poetry from the University of Denver in 1988.
Bilgere has received grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Ohio Arts Council. In 1991 he was a Fulbright scholar in Bilbao, Spain. In 2002 was named a Witter Bynner Fellow through the Library of Congress by U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. He has won a Pushcart Prize, and in 2014 was awarded a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship from Cleveland's Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC). Billy Collins has called Bilgere's work "a welcome breath of fresh, American air in the house of contemporary poetry."
Bilgere has given poetry readings at the Library of Congress, the 92nd Street Y in New York, and at universities and arts centers around the country.
He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at John Carroll University. [1] He also hosts "Wordplay", a spoken-word radio program on WJCU [2] that has been called "the Car Talk of poetry." [3]
Bilgere's poems have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, [4] Agni, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Chicago Review, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner.
His poems appear frequently on Garrison Keillor’s NPR program, The Writer's Almanac, and in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. [5]
Bilgere has been a featured guest on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion." [6]
Michael Salinger, reviewing a reading from his 2010 book The White Museum, called Bilgere "dangerously clever" and said "Bilgere’s work is deceptively simple. The accessibility that is so often frowned upon by 'serious' poetry instructors invites readers into George's world of cafes where everyday observations take on archetypal importance." [8] John Freeman, writing in The Plain Dealer , said of Imperial, "Manipulating a reader's pace with punctuation, or lack thereof, Bilgere gives us the sense we’re not just there—we’re him, watching. Time speeds up, accelerates, and then it's past. [9] Michael Heaton, reviewing Blood Pages for the Plain Dealer, said: "When I read his stuff, I always marvel at his ability to take the events of everyday life and make them transcendently sacramental and at the same time gently hilarious." [10]
WJCU – branded WJCU 88.7 FM – is a non-commercial educational college/variety radio station licensed to University Heights, Ohio, serving Greater Cleveland. The station is owned by John Carroll University, which operates it under the direction of the Department of Communications and Theatre Arts. The WJCU studios are located at the D.J. Lombardo Student Center on the campus of John Carroll, while the station transmitter resides atop Graselli Tower.
Lynn Collins Emanuel is an American poet. Some of her poetry collections are Then, Suddenly— and Noose and Hook.
Jim Simmerman was a poet and editor from the United States.
Stanley Plumly was an American poet and the director of University of Maryland, College Park's creative writing program.
Dorothy Barresi is an American poet.
David Wojahn is a contemporary American poet who teaches poetry in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in the low residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has been the director of Virginia Commonwealth University's Creative Writing Program.
Bob Hicok is an American poet.
Terrance Hayes is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. In September 2014, he was one of 21 recipients of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals who show outstanding creativity in their work.
Stuart Dischell is an American poet and Professor in English Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Mary Biddinger is an American poet, editor, and academic.
Mary Crow is an American poet, translator, and professor who served as the poet laureate of Colorado for 14 years. She is the author of three collections of poetry, three chapbooks and five translations.
Peter Paul Everwine was an American poet.
Adrian Blevins is an American poet. Author of three collections of poetry, her most recent is Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize. Her other full-length poetry collections are Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha. With Karen McElmurray, Blevins recently co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia, a collection of essays of new and emerging Appalachian poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. Her chapbooks are Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, which won the first of Bright Hill Press's chapbook contests..
Maxine Scates is an American poet.
James Reiss was an American poet and novelist.
G. C. Waldrep is an American poet and historian.
Ramón Arroyo was an American playwright, poet and scholar of Puerto Rican descent who wrote numerous books and received many literary awards. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. His work deals extensively with issues of immigration, Latino culture, and homosexuality. Arroyo was openly gay and frequently wrote self-reflexive, autobiographical texts. He was the long-term partner of the American poet Glenn Sheldon.
Gregory Pardlo is an American poet, writer, and professor. His book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and on National Public Radio. His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”
Philip Metres is an American writer, poet, translator, scholar, and essayist.
Benjamin S. Grossberg is an American poet and educator.