Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh on February 18, 1925. He was educated in both Pittsburgh and San Francisco, where he later participated in Jack Spicer’s famous “Poetry as Magic” workshop at San Francisco State College in 1957. Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy (Yale University Press, 1962), won the Yale Younger Poets Series and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Soon after publishing his first book, Gilbert received a Guggenheim Fellowship and subsequently moved abroad, living in Denmark, England, and Greece. During that time, he also toured fifteen countries as a lecturer on American literature for the U.S. State Department. Nearly twenty years after completing Views of Jeopardy, he published his second book, Monolithos (Knopf, 1982), which won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize. The collection takes its title from Greek, meaning “single stone,” and refers to the landscape where he lived on the island of Santorini. (Source)