Presented By: English Language & Literature - MFA Program in Creative Writing
Zell Visiting Writers Series Presents: Campbell McGrath
Poetry Reading
Campbell McGrath has published numerous collections of poetry, including Spring Comes to Chicago, which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In awarding the prize, poet Garrett Hongo labeled McGrath's unique tone “ironic romanticism.” The centerpiece of the collection, and McGrath's most well-known poem, is “The Bob Hope Poem,” a 70-page opus modeled on Robert Pinsky's “An Explanation of America” and James McMichael's “Four Good Things.” In a 2005 interview McGrath explained that the poem's shape “is not a narrative but a symphonic structure.” McGrath is also the co-translator of Aristophanes's The Wasps. He has won a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares literary journal, and a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1999), The New American Poets (2000), and Great American Prose Poems (2003). McGrath has taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Florida International University.