Gregory Pardlo

Gregory Pardlo was born in Philadelphia in 1968. He is the author of the poetry collections Spectral Evidence (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), which was long-listed for the National Book Award; Digest (Four Way Books, 2014), which received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was short-listed for the 2015 NAACP Image Award; and Totem (American Poetry Review), which was selected by Brenda Hillman for the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is also the author of Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America (Knopf, 2018), a memoir in essays. 

Of his work, Cyrus Cassells writes, “Pardlo is a modern griot and shape-shifter, a Prospero of unforced allusion: an up-for-anything Pardlo poem can deftly evoke sociology, jazz, lofty philosophy, African American lit, Russian cinema, Greek mythology, European travel, film noir, hip hop, and a host of other topics.”

Pardlo is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. He is the poetry editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University–Camden. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.