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Scott Hightower is an American poet, teacher, and reviewer. He is the author of five books of poetry. His third, Part of the Bargain, won the 2004 Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets. He is a recipient of a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for a translation from Spanish.
Hightower was born in Lampasas, Texas. He was the youngest child of a family that lived on a modest working ranch near the hamlet of Lometa, Texas. Hightower had a sister and a brother. Billie Jewel Hightower (July 27, 1950 (Lampasas, Texas) - Oct. 15, 1992, West Palm Beach, Florida), his brother became a noted painter in Texas, the Chicago area, and Florida. [1]
At the University of Texas at Austin, Hightower studied classical civilization, literature, and performance, earning his BA in communications in 1973. He earned a Master's degree in teaching at Antioch College in 1977. [2] Eventually, he earning his Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1994 [3] where he studied under J.D. McClatchy. [4] Poet William Matthews was also one of his mentors. [5]
Hightower’s first four English-language collections are sweeps of philosophical idylls, much in the tradition of Theocritus, a poet the author himself evokes from time to time. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the stance of the poet is that of an observant pilgrim traveling through the world. The poems range widely in style and subject: soliloquies, laments, eccentric ponderings, and contemplations of the physical and the sublime.
In Tin Can Tourist, Hightower’s first book, the poems covers the plains of Texas to the streets of the Bronx; from the bedroom to the Spanish Steps of Rome and the Chora Church of Istanbul and back. The poems examines cultural highs and lows. Of the book, poet Marie Ponsot wrote, "The most exciting quality of Hightower’s work is its poetic and paradoxical unifying of emotional and intellectual depth with a marvelous quietness. Its lively incidents and anecdotes are grounded, rooted, in meditative awareness." [6]
In Natural Trouble, the theme of inheritance extends through changes of landscape and bad weather. Of this book, poet J.D. McClatchy wrote: "Scott Hightower has Marianne Moore’s scissors and Elizabeth Bishop’s spectacles and he has written a book in the spirit of their adventurous precisions." [7]
Hightower’s third book, Part of the Bargain, received the 2004 Copper Canyon Press Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets. [8] In it, Hightower explores the reconciliations that make one an individual, a part of a community, and as conscientious heir to a culture. Valences of biology, sexuality, nationality, literality, all swirl together.
Self-evident departs from a notion that the practice of writing is at the elemental core of democracy. He reminds us that poetry by definition "seeks a foundation of the commonwealth in the truth of the individual, guaranteed and restored through the integrity of Language."
Hontanares was published by Devenir (el otro), Madrid, 2012. It is a bilingual collection of poems translated into Spanish by Natalia Carbajosa from Cartagena. Hontanares was launched in at El Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Nov. 13, 2012. Carbajosa, publisher Juan Pastor, and novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina made presentations. [9] This book extends Hightower's work on the Albornoz family, a family of statesmen (Álvaro de Albornoz y Liminiana and Severo Ochoa de Albornoz ), scientists, and poets, including Aurora de Albornoz. This book bridges into Hightower's Self-evident with its themes of radical thought and exile.
Of Imperative to Spare, Hightower's 2023 release, poet Cynthia Hogue wrote: "This necessary volume blazes a trail through despair to wisdom.” [10]
Hightower's poetry reviews often appear in Fogged Clarity,The Brooklyn Rail,The Journal,Manhattan Review,Coldfront Magazine, and other national journals. He teaches writing at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. [11] He lives in New York City and sojourns in Spain.
Carpe diem is a Latin aphorism, usually translated "seize the day", taken from book 1 of the Roman poet Horace's work Odes.
Marin Sorescu was a Romanian poet, playwright, and novelist.
Ángel González Muñiz was a major Spanish poet of the twentieth century.
Lucien Stryk was an American poet, translator of Buddhist literature and Zen poetry, and former English professor at Northern Illinois University (NIU).
J. D. "Sandy" McClatchy was an American poet, opera librettist and literary critic. He was editor of the Yale Review and president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Emanuel Xavier, is an American poet, spoken word artist, author, editor, and LGBTQ activist born and raised in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn. Associated with the East Village, Manhattan arts scene in New York City, he emerged from the ball culture scene and the Nuyorican movement to become a successful poet, writer and advocate for gay youth programs and Latino gay literature.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Aurora de Albornoz was born in Luarca, Asturias, Spain. As a youth, she lived in Luarca with her parents, sister, and extended family, throughout the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939— an event that inspired her later poetry.
Copper Canyon Press is an independent, non-profit small press, founded in 1972 by Sam Hamill, Tree Swenson, Bill O'Daly, and Jim Gautney, specializing exclusively in the publication of poetry. It is located in Port Townsend, Washington.
Ecopoetry is poetry with a strong ecological emphasis or message. Many poets, poems and books of poems have expressed ecological concerns; but only recently has the term ecopoetry gained use. There is now, in English-speaking poetry, a recognisable subgenre of ecopoetry.
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet and physician. He is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for his collection of poems The Earth in the Attic.
Hyam Plutzik, was an American poet and educator and is best known for Horatio, a long narrative poem that illustrates the illusiveness of memory through a search for the true identity of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Three of Plutzik’s poetry books, including Horatio, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and his work continues to garner praise from leading scholars and critics. Since Plutzik’s death, several new books related to his life and work have been published, with Forewords written by noted poets and scholars, including Anthony Hecht (1987), [./Https://english.yale.edu/people/professors-emeritus/david-kastan David Scott Kastan] (2012), Daniel Halpern (2017), Richard Blanco (2021), and Edward Hirsch (2023). In May 2012, The Paris Review published a feature article on Plutzik: “A Great Stag – Broad Antlered: Rediscovering Hyam Plutzik.”
Alfred Corn is an American poet and essayist.
Edwin Honig was an American poet, playwright, and translator.
Stephen Yenser is an American poet and literary critic who has published three acclaimed volumes of verse, as well as books on James Merrill, Robert Lowell, and an assortment of contemporary poets. With J.D. McClatchy, he is co-literary executor of the James Merrill estate and co-editor of six volumes of Merrill's work.
Julie Sheehan is an American poet.
Lisa Olstein is an American poet and non-fiction writer.
Terese Coe is an American writer, translator, and dramatist. Her work has been published in over 100 journals in the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and India. She is the author of three collections of poetry, four published prose stories, and many translations from the French, German, and Spanish.
Natalia Litvinova is an Argentinian writer and editor of Belarusian origins, working in the fields of poetry and translation.
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