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George Bilgere
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Email: gbilgere@jcu.edu
“Once again, George Bilgere has shown that imaginative wonders and deep emotional truths can be achieved with plain, colloquial American speech,” says former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins of Bilgere’s newest book, The White Museum. Alicia Ostriker, who judged the 2009 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, says, “George Bilgere is an absolute whiz at the twists and turns of the glorious English language, the flexible American syntax, as spoken by everybody up and down the great chain of Americanness in our bewitched century.”
In 2006 Bilgere’s Haywire won the May Swenson Poetry Prize. In 2002 The Good Kiss was chosen by Billy Collins to win the University of Akron Poetry Prize. His poems appear frequently on Garrison Keillor’s NPR program, The Writer’s Almanac, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.
George Bilgere has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, the Society of Midland Authors, the Ohio Arts Council, the Ohioana Library Association, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the Fulbright Foundation. In 2009 he received a Pushcart Award. He has read his poetry at venues around the country, including the Library of Congress, the 92nd Street Y in New York, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Bilgere teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Living in Cleveland has made him tough, resolute, and uncomplaining. He also hosts Wordplay, a spoken-word radio program that has been called “the Car Talk of poetry.” |
