Gabriel Gudding
Gabriel Gudding is an American poet, essayist, and translator. Life. Gudding attended The Evergreen State College, an experimental school in Olympia, Washington, Purdue University and Cornell University. He is Professor of English in the English Studies Department at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois where he was hired to teach experimental poetry writing and poetics. His work has been translated into French, Danish, Portuguese, Vietnamese and Spanish. Gudding is the author of the books, "" (Ahsahta Press, 2015), "Rhode Island Notebook" (Dalkey Archive, 2007), and "A Defense of Poetry" (University of Pittsburgh Press), which won the 2001 Agnes Lynch  Starrett Prize. He has given hundreds of poetry readings and lectures in Europe, the Caribbean, and America. He has published poems and essays in periodicals such as "Harper’s Magazine", "The Nation", and "The Journal of the History of Ideas". His poetry appears dozens of anthologies, including "Best American Experimental Writing" (Wesleyan, 2016), "&Now: Best Innovative Writing" (2010), "Best American Poetry" (Scribner, 2010) and "Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present" (Scribner). His translations from Spanish appear in anthologies such as "The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry" (Oxford UP), "Poems for the Millennium" (University of California Press ), and "The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry" (University of California Press) Gudding has a daughter named Clio. Gudding practices vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin (as taught by S. N. Goenka). Books. A recipient of The Nation Discovery Award, Gudding received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Pitt Poetry Series for his first book "A Defense of Poetry". Gudding's second book of poetry, "Rhode Island Notebook", was published in November 2007 by Dalkey Archive Press. "Rhode Island Notebook" is a 436-page poem interlarded with essays. It was  written in Gudding's car on the highways between Normal, Illinois, and Providence, Rhode Island, during 26 roundtrip journeys, and has been called by the polymathic writer and artist Alan Sondheim, "the first 21st Century classic." Ahsahta Press published Gudding's third book, "Literature for Nonhumans", in 2015.