Lauded for his bold, thought-provoking writing, SMU alumnus Tim Seibles will receive the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize November 11 at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan. Previous winners of the prestigious award include past U.S. Poets Laureate Robert Penn Warren (1971) and Robert Pinksy (2008).
The award recognizes his most recent collection of poetry, Fast Animal (Etruscan Press, 2012). The book earned a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2013 and was a National Book Award for Poetry finalist in 2012.
Tim Seibles’ work is proof: the new American poet can’t just speak one language. In his new book, he fuses our street corners’ quickest wit, our violent vernaculars, and our numerous tongues of longing and love. He records danger. He records the sensual world. And he records a troubled enlightenment, which is a ‘fast animal’ pivoting toward two histories at once.” – National Book Foundation citation
Publisher’s Weekly calls Fast Animal “crisply comic, disarmingly frank and aurally bold.”
A native of Philadelphia, Seibles earned a bachelor’s degree in English from SMU in 1977 and an M.F.A. from Vermont College of Norwich University. He serves on the faculty of Old Dominion University as an associate professor of English and creative writing and resides in Virginia. He also is a teaching board member of the Muse Writers Workshop and a part-time faculty member of the University of Maine’s Stonecoast M.F.A. in writing program.
In May, he was invited to participate in the Library of Congress’ celebration of poet Countee Cullen’s birthday. One of the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance era, Cullen died in 1946. Seibles, who has taught Cullen’s work in his classes, read selected poems and discussed the writer’s work at the program.
Seibles, one of America’s foremost African-American poets, has given the world a collection of tight, elegant and honest poems about growing up; themes of innocence, memory, (un)knowing run throughout.” – Undertow Magazine
Other books by Seibles include Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999) and Buffalo Head Solos (2004). His work also has been featured in the anthologies In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African American Poetry (1994), Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), and Best American Poetry (2010).
Seibles approaches themes of racial tension, class conflict and intimacy from several directions at once in poems with plainspoken yet fast-turning language.” – The Poetry Foundation
The Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, named for the late poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for “The Waking,” has been awarded since 1968 to notable poets for a particular collection of poems published in a specific three-year period. The award ceremony is part of the six-day Theodore Roethke Poetry and Arts Festival November 7-12 in Midland, Michigan.
> Read an excerpt from Fast Animal
> Tim Seibles reads “Wound” from Fast Animal