Gregory Pardlo

Gregory Pardlo is an American poet born in 1968 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in Willingboro, New Jersey. He received his M.F.A. from New York University and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Rutgers University-Camden. His collection Digest (2014) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The collection is marked by its formal dexterity, intellectual range, and close attention to working-class life, jazz culture, and the African American experience. Pardlo's debut collection Totem (2007) won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Pardlo is also the author of a memoir, Air Traffic (2018), about his father's role as an air traffic controller during Ronald Reagan's infamous firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.