Albert Goldbarth

1948 –
Read poems by this poet

Albert Goldbarth was born in Chicago on January 31, 1948. He received his BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in 1969 and his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1971. He taught at Elgin Community College in Chicago until 1972 and was a coordinator for the Traveling Writers Workshop for public schools in the Chicago area. In 1974, he completed a year of classes at the University of Utah while working toward his PhD in creative writing. Within a year, Goldbarth received the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, published the chapbook Under Cover, and completed two full-length poetry collections: Coprolites (New Rivers Press) and Opticks (Seven Woods Press), both published in 1974. He left Utah early to pursue a teaching career and worked briefly at Cornell and Syracuse Universities before moving to the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught from 1977 to 1987.

Since then, Goldbarth has published more than twenty-five collections of poetry, including To Be Read in 500 Years: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2009); The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972–2007 (Graywolf Press, 2009); Saving Lives (Ohio State University Press, 2001); and Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (University of Georgia Press, 1991). The two earlier collections won National Book Critics Circle Awards for Poetry. Goldbarth is the only poet to have received the award twice. He is also the author of Popular Culture (Ohio State Univeristy Press, 1989), which received the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award, and Jan. 31 (Doubleday, 1974), which was nominated in 1975 for the National Book Award.

When asked about the “job of poetry,” Goldbarth told The Missouri Review, “It’s not my place to define the job of poetry, but a lot of my poems do try to serve as memorials, as segments of frozen time that save people or cultural moments that have otherwise passed away or are in danger of passing away.”

Goldbarth was invited to edit Every Pleasure: The “Seneca Review” Long Poem Anthology (Seneca Review Press, 1979). He has also written several collections of essays, including Many Circles (Graywolf Press, 2001), winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award; A Sympathy of Souls (Coffee House Press, 1990); and Great Topics of the World (Picador USA, 1994). He is also the author of the novel, Pieces of Payne (Graywolf Press, 2001). His work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including The Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1985).

About his work, the critic Helen Vendler has said, “Half of Goldbarth’s imagination . . . is what is usually called religious. Goldbarth’s tenderness toward the mystical does not, however, vitiate his enormous curiosity, or the momentum of his zest, or his sympathy of souls with the historical personages he resuscitates. . . . His rhetoric is eager to mirror the number of things the world is full of, the unexpected fulfillments it holds in its arms.”

Goldbarth’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was also named to the arts advisory board of the Judah L. Magnes Jewish Museum in Berkeley, California, in 1999.

Goldbarth is the Adele Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University in Kansas, where he has taught since 1987. He lives in Wichita.