The Wonder-World

Albert Goldbarth was born in Chicago in 1948 and has been a reader and writer for as long as he can remember. It was his high school English teacher Rhoda Feldman who introduced him to Wordsworth and Ginsberg (a great duality-pairing!) and helped steer his instincts into the road toward poetry. By now his books have twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award nomination (he is the only poet to have been honored that way two times), a National Book Award nomination, a Los Angeles Times Prize nomination, the Milt Kessler Award, the PEN West Non-Fiction Prize, and an Ohio State/The Journal book publication award, and his work has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award, and annual awards from Poetry magazine, among others. 

He is grateful that his books (there are dozens, and chapbooks as well) have appeared from some of the country’s most highly regarded poetry series: in addition to Boa Editions, that includes Graywolf Press, Doubleday, Ohio State University Press, Coffee House Press, the University of Pittsburgh Press, the University of Georgia Press, and such stalwart indie presses as Lynx House Books and Tavern Books. Besides poetry, he has published a novel and numerous collections of literary essays. 

Hundreds of individual poems have appeared in periodicals ranging from The New Yorker, The Nation, and Harper’s, to lively small single-editor journals like Kayak and Happiness Holding Tank. His work can also be found in genre-defining anthologies like The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry and the hundred-year celebration anthologies from The New Yorker and Poetry. Over the years his work has been chosen for inclusion a number of times in the annual Pushcart Prize: The Best of Small Presses anthology, and in the annual Best American Poetry series. And he has read his poetry across the country (at, for example, the Library of Congress, and once on stage at the Folger Shakespeare Library in front of the Forest of Arden scenery from Shakespeare’s As You Like It).

Rereading the above, he finds it smacking of drab records-keeping and boasting but the fact remains that, since his Rhoda Feldman days, he has been dedicated to the joyous labor of writing poetry, and to relishing and learning from the poetry of others. As Robert Bly says in a poem, “I have spent my whole life doing what I love.” For the last forty years Albert has lived in Wichita, Kansas with his spiffy collection of 1950s space toys and vintage typewriter paraphernalia, and his unfailingly astonishing wife Skylar. He has never directly used computer-based technology (has never, for example, sent or received an email), and he invites you to join him in the ranks of the resistance.