John Gery

Area of Specialty: Poetry

John Gery was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1953, and grew up in Lititz, Pennsylvania. He earned degrees from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University. His five published collections of poetry include Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures (Plumbers Ink, 1983), winner of the Plumbers Ink Poetry Award; The Enemies of Leisure (Story Line, 1995), honored by Publishers Weekly as a "Best Book of 1995" and awarded a 1995-96 Critics Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books and Today's First Edition television series; American Ghost: Selected Poems (Raska Skola, 1999; Cross-Cultural, 1999), a bilingual English-Serbian collection translated by Biljana D. Obradovic, which received the European Award of the Circle Franz Kafka in Prague; Davenport's Version (Portals Press, 2003), a book-length narrative poem about the Civil War in New Orleans, which Stephen Berendt in Prairie Schooner calls a “tour de force . . . , a remarkable feat of poetic and psychological sleight of hand”; and most recently, A Gallery of Ghosts (UNO Press, 2008). He has also published two chapbooks, The Burning of New Orleans (Amelia, 1988), winner of the Charles William Duke Long Poem Award, and Three Poems (LeStat, 1989).

Gery's other books include his major critical study, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness (University Press of Florida, 1996); For the House of Torkom (Cross-Cultural, 1999), co-translated with Vahe Baladouni, a bilingual volume of the prose poems of Armenian poet Hmayyag Shems; In Venice and in the Veneto with Ezra Pound (Venice: Supernova, 2007); co-authored with Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Massimo Bacigalupo, and Stefano Maria Casella; his edited collection of the poetry in English by Serbian poet Aleksandar Soknic, The Accidental Visitor in the Dark (Belgrade: Interprint, 2008); a collaborative translation from French with Ivan Zaknic of the architect Le Corbusier's memoir, Journey to the East (MIT Press, 2007); and the critical biography, co-authored with Vahe Baladouni, Hmayeak Shems: Armenian Poet of Pure Spirit (forthcoming, University Press of America).

Gery's poetry, criticism, and reviews have appeared in journals throughout the country and in Europe, including American Literature, Callaloo, CEA Critic, Chicago Review, Contemporary Literature, Gulf Coast Review, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Louisiana Literature, New Orleans Review, New Virginia Review, Notre Dame Review, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, South Central Review, Southwest Review, and Verse. His poems and prose have been translated into Serbian, Italian, Romanian, Chinese, Farsi, and Bengali. For his work, he has received, among other awards, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Artist Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, two Deep South Writers Poetry Awards, a Wesleyan University Summer Poetry Fellowship, and the Academy of American Poets Poetry Award. In Spring 2006, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, and in 2007 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in American Literature and Creative Writing to Belgrade University. In 2005 he was appointed Secretary of the Ezra Pound International Conference and has served as Co-Convener of Pound meetings in Venice (2007) and Rome (2008).

A Research Professor of English at the UNO, Gery regularly teaches Poetry Writing at all levels, Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Poetry as a Genre, American Women's Poetry, Caribbean Poetry, Poetry and Multiculturalism, British Literature from the Romantics to the Present, American Literature, and Composition courses. Since 1990 he has also served as the founding Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg, Italy, and is a member of the Women's Studies faculty. He has also taught at Stanford, San Jose State, and the University of Iowa, has three times been a Poet in Residence at Bucknell University, and has lectured and read his poetry at universities in Serbia, Turkey, Italy, China, and throughout the U.S. He has been awarded a UNO Alumni Foundation Teaching Award (1990), as well as the English department's Outstanding Service Award (1997), and he has received a Seraphia D. Leyda Teaching Fellowship for 2009-12.

Currently, Gery is completing a collection of poetry, entitled Have at You Now! His critical projects involve recent American poetry and cultural identity, a literary guide to Ezra Pound's Venice, and varied work on international poets, as well as a volume of essays on Pound co-edited with William Pratt.