Overview
Nathaniel Mackey works in the areas of modern and postmodern literature in the U.S. and the Caribbean, creative writing, poetry and poetics, and the intersection of literature and music. He is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and criticism, most recently Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015), Late Arcade (New Directions, 2017), and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2018), respectively. Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company. He is editor of the literary magazine Hambone, coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), coeditor, with Michael Boughn, Kent Johnson and others, of Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance(Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017).His awards and honors include the selection of his first book of poetry, Eroding Witness,for publication in the National Poetry Series (1985), a Whiting Writer’s Award (1993), election to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets (2001), the National Book Award in poetry for his fourth book of poetry, Splay Anthem(2006), an Artist’s Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2007), the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize (2007), the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society (2008), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation (2014), the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University (2015), the William B. Hart Residency in Poetry at the American Academy in Rome (2016), the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress (2017), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018).