Peter Gizzi is an internationally recognized poet and the author of several collections of poetry, including Archeophonics (Finalist for the National Book Award, Wesleyan, 2016), In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan, 2014), Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011), The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992).
He has been the poetry editor for The Nation, co-founded and edited o·blēk: a journal of language arts, and since 2003 has served as contributing editor to the journal Conjunctions. Other editorial projects include The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995), The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), and with Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008).
A professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Gizzi has also taught for Brown University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa, the University of New Orleans Summer Program in Madrid, Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Cambridge University.
His honors include the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from the Fund for Poetry (1993), the Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). In 2011, he was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University.