George Bilgere

NEWS! Bilgere Wins the 2006 May Swenson Poetry Award
Poet Edward Field has selected George’s new book, “Haywire,” to win the 2006 May Swenson Poetry Award. The book will be published by Utah State University Press in 2006.

George Bilgere directs the Writing Program at John Carroll. He claims to be the author of three books of poetry, “The Going” (University of Missouri Press, winner of the Devins Award and the Midland Authors Award), “Big Bang” (Copper Beech Press, winner of the Midland Poets Prize), and “The Good Kiss” (University of Akron Press). U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected “The Good Kiss” as the winner of the University of Akron’s Poetry Prize in 2001. Bilgere won the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature in 2003 (an award whose previous winners include Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison), and he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. He’s given poetry readings at the Library of Congress and the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York’s 92nd Street Y. All this and he’s barely twenty! His poems show up in places like Poetry, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, and lots of “reviews,” like The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The New England Review, and, of course, The Review Review.

He oversees the Visiting Writers Series at John Carroll, and in the last few years has:

• Visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Billy Collins when Collins gave a reading here. Collins pronounced the Pink Floyd exhibit “way cool.”

• Eaten a hot dog with Rita Dove, who deserved better but had to deal with our budget restrictions.

• Consumed two, possibly three Guinesses with Eavan Boland, who had to admit that Bilgere had “taught me something about being Irish.”

With the help of Steve Hayward, he hosts Cleveland’s most peculiar spoken word radio show, WORDPLAY.

Students describe Bilgere’s poetry writing workshops as “awesome,” or “really awesome.” Some of the students in his workshops have gone on for MAs or MFAs at awesome places like the University of Virginia, Case Western University, and Florida State University, and their poetry has been published in some of the best journals in the country, including Poetry, The Atlanta Review, Whiskey Island, Tin House, and Rattle.

George Bilgere can be emailed at gbilgere@jcu.edu. His website is www.georgebilgere.com.