Tiger of the Week: Reginald Gibbons ’69

When Tiger of the Week Reginald Gibbons ’69 was named one of five finalists for the 2008 National Book Award in poetry for his new collection, Creatures of a Day (LSU Press, 2008), he understood the significance of the honor. "It's very exciting, very gratifying, and it makes me feel that my work is very present at this moment in the U.S.," Gibbons told interviewer Craig Morgan Teicher. "The country is so huge and so many thousands of books are published, that it's not often enough that a writer can feel that a book is present -- you can publish it but it still remains absent from the culture." Gibbons, a professor of English, classics, and Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, did not win the poetry award (Mark Doty received the prize Nov. 19), but he was right to believe that his work is "present": His hometown newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, published one of his poems, "These Sideways Leaps, Remembering." Nov. 22. (Photo by Marc Hauser, courtesy LSU Press)
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