Peter Gizzi

Peter Gizzi was born on August 7, 1959, and grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Gizzi’s books of poetry include Fierce Elegy (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), short-listed for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize; Archeophonics (Wesleyan University Press, 2016); In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (Wesleyan University Press, 2014); The Outernationale (Wesleyan University Press, 2007); and Periplum: Or, I, the Blaze (Avec Books, 1992). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into numerous languages. With Kevin Killian, he coedited The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

About Gizzi’s collection Artificial Heart, the critic Marjorie Perloff writes,

In his visionary quest, his raw emotion, and his New York school spontaneity, Gizzi performs a clinamen that relates him to [Frank] O’Hara, [John] Ashbery, and, beyond these poets, to [Arthur] Rimbaud and Hart Crane.... [A] master of the mot juste and of sound structure. Most of the book’s poems ... are as memorable as they are moving and spare.

Gizzi has held residencies at MacDowell, the Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, and the Centre International de Poesie Marseille. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Gizzi’s additional work as an editor includes o•blék: a journal of language arts and The Exact Change Yearbook. He has taught at Brown University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is currently on the faculty of the English department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.