Scott Hightower

Scott Hightower was born on a ranch in central Texas on August 4, 1952. He earned a BA in communications from the University of Texas at Austin in 1973, an EdM in curriculum and programming from Antioch College in 1977, and an MFA in poetry writing from Columbia University in 1994.

Hightower is the author of Contraído (Elenvés Editoras, 2022); Self-evident (Barrow Street Press, 2012); Part of the Bargain (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), winner of the Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets; Natural Trouble (Fordham University Press, 2003); and Tin Can Tourist (Fordham University Press, 2001). He has also published two bilingual collections of poems in Spanish—Tartessos (Devenir, 2019), translated by Maria Elena Becerril-Longares with the assistance of José Luis Fernández de Albornoz and Guadalupe Ruiz Fajardo, and Hontanares (Devenir, 2012), translated by Natalia Carbajosa. Hightower’s own translations of poems by the Spanish-Puerto Rican poet Aurora de Albornoz have garnered him a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.

About his poetry, Marie Ponsot has said: “The most exciting quality of Hightower’s work is its poetic and paradoxical unifying of emotional and intellectual depth with a marvelous quietness.”

Hightower has taught at Drew University, Fordham University, Poets House, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). He is currently on the part-time faculty at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. A former poet-in-residence at Fordham University, Hightower lives in New York City.