Tom Sleigh

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Tom Sleigh is an American poet, dramatist, essayist and academic, who currently lives in New York City. He has published seven books of original poetry, one full-length translation of Euripides' Herakles and a book of essays. At least five of his plays have been produced. And he has won numerous awards including the 2008 Kingley Tufts Award, worth $100,000,[1] an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, [2] The Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, [3] and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. [4] He currently serves as director of Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in Creative Writing.

Contents

[edit] Life

Tom Sleigh was born in Mount Pleasant, Texas,[5] where he lived until the age of five, when he moved to Utah. He lived in Utah until seventh grade, when he moved to California.[6] He attended the California Institute of the Arts,[7], Evergreen State College,[8], and the Writing Seminars Johns Hopkins University[9] for two years, where he graduated with an MA.[10] And in his mid-twenties moved to Massachusetts, to work at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.[11] He began teaching at Dartmouth University in 1986[12] and later taught at New York University, the University of Iowa, UC-Berkley and Johns Hopkins University. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and serves as director of the Hunter College Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, where he also teaches poetry writing.[13]

[edit] Artistic Influences

In an interview published in the literary journal Agni, Sleigh lists his poetic influences:

I'd have to say that Browning for his technique; Wallace Stevens for a certain quality of gravitas, what Keats feels near his death, when he said he was living a sort of posthumous existence; Philip Larkin for his sense of extremity; Pound for his fluidity of conception and hardness of execution; Baudelaire for his music and intense scrutiny and affection for street life; and Bishop and Lowell for their immersion in the physical world, would be my fathers and mothers.[14]

[edit] Poetic Works

  • After One (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983)
  • Waking (University of Chicago Press, 1990)
  • The Chain (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
  • The Dreamhouse (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
  • Far Side of the Earth (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003)
  • Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007)

[edit] Prose Works

  • Interview With a Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2006)

[edit] Dramatic Works

  • Ice Trucker Pilgrimage, a multi-media opera (presented at San Francisco Film Festival 2006)
  • The Knowledge and Conversation of My Holy Guardian Angel, or an Old-Fashioned Love Story (produced in 2004, New York Fringe Theater Festival)
  • Rubber (performed at the Midtown International Theatre Festival, Raw Space Theater, New York City, 2002; winner of "Best of the Fest" award and a 2003 OOBR Award from the Off Off Broadway Review)[15]
  • Barbarosa (staged reading at Boston University's Playwright's Theater, 1998)
  • Ahab's Wife (performed at Loeb's ART Institute, Boston, 1997; and Jim Henson Foundation's International Festival of Puppet Theater, New York City, 1998)

[edit] Translations

  • Herakles by Euripides (Oxford University Press USA, 2000)

[edit] Awards

  • Kingsley Tufts Award (2008), worth $100,000, awarded by Claremont Graduate University, for Sleigh's collection Space Walk [16]
  • Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters [17]
  • The Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America [18]
  • Guggenheim Foundation Grant [19]
  • Ingram Merill Foundation Grant [20]
  • Two National Endowment for the Arts grants [21]

[edit] Sources

[edit] References

  1. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  2. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  3. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  4. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  5. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  6. ^ AGNI Online: Interview with Tom Sleigh by Allegra Wong
  7. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  8. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  9. ^ Dartmouth News - Dartmouth professor Thomas Sleigh nominated for L.A. Times book prize - 03/24/00
  10. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  11. ^ AGNI Online: Interview with Tom Sleigh by Allegra Wong
  12. ^ Dartmouth News - Dartmouth professor Thomas Sleigh nominated for L.A. Times book prize - 03/24/00
  13. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  14. ^ AGNI Online: Interview with Tom Sleigh by Allegra Wong
  15. ^ AGNI Online: Interview with Tom Sleigh by Allegra Wong
  16. ^ http://www.pw.org/content/poet_tom_sleigh_walks_away_100000
  17. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  18. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  19. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  20. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
  21. ^ Ploughshares, the literary journal

[edit] External links