Description
New poems from award winning poet Ed Roberson.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Ed Roberson worked in the area’s steel mills, in an advertising graphics agency, and as a research assistant in limnology, studying inland and coastal freshwater systems on trips to Alaska and Bermuda. His scientific research, and his role in the Explorers Club of Pittsburgh’s South America expeditions, led him to a job working with exotic underwater animals. For several years in the late 1960s, he was employed as a diver and tankman at the newly formed Pittsburgh AquaZoo (now the PPG Aquarium), where he fed, cared for, and in some cases trained the creatures described in this collection. Widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of ecopoetry of our time, Roberson’s focus never moves far from the destructive dominance of racial whiteness that has long and unnaturally dominated our shared world and wreaked ruination on it. In his many published books, as in this one, he provides an unwhite (and unwhiting) take not only on the things that are but on language as it reaches out to them.
Poetry. African & African American Studies.
Author Bio
Ed Roberson's twelve previous books of poetry include MPH AND OTHER ROAD POEMS (Verge Books, 2021) and Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2021), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. A former special programs administrator at Rutgers University's Cook Campus, Roberson has lived in Chicago since 2004 and is an emeritus professor in Northwestern University's MFA creative writing program. He has also held posts at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Cave Canem retreat for Black writers. His honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the African American Literature and Culture Association's Stephen Henderson Critics Award.
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA