Tim Seibles

Acclaimed Poet
National Book Award Finalist
Virginia Poet Laureate

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• An Evening with Tim Seibles

Biography

“Jazzily unpredictable” —Publishers Weekly 

“Tim Seibles is a poet of extraordinary sensitivity. His images are luminous–almost unbearably vivid–evocations of the world around us, past and present.” –Martin Espada

“Tim Seibles’ version of our changing and growing American speech range widely, from anguish to comedy, from transcendence to earthly bewilderment.”—Li-Young Lee 

Born in Philadelphia in 1955, Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including his most recent, Voodoo Libretto (Etruscan Press, 2022), One Turn Around the Sun (Etruscan Press, 2017), and Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award. Other titles are Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Hammerlock (1999), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), and Body Moves (1988).

Several questions drive the collection One Turn Around the Sun, the most central being how can a person stay sane when so often socio-political circumstances mock all efforts to create a livable world. Kwame Dawes says, “These are profoundly vulnerable poems that are distinguished by the risk and daring that we expect from our best poets. His alluring sensuality, and his splendid and welcoming humor will be wholly satisfied by this beautiful collection.” This book bolsters an ongoing engagement with life at a time when running away is a great temptation. Fast Animal is about the importance of remembering, the burden of race, and the meaning of true wakefulness. Publishers Weekly says, “Seibles’s refusal to sentimentalize family life or his own baser urges lends credibility to the more surreal rhetorical and metaphorical leaps, buoying the reader with him on history’s turbulent sea.”

Reflecting on writing, Seibles says, “I think poetry, if it’s going to be really engaging and engaged, has to be able to come at the issues of our lives from all kinds of angles and all kinds of ways: loudly and quietly, angrily and soothingly, with comedy and with dead seriousness. Our lives are worth every risk, every manner of approach.”

His poems has been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles has received fellowships from both the Provincetown Fine Arts Center and The National Endowment for the Arts. He also won the Open Voice Award from the 63rd Street Y in New York City. On July 15, 2016, Seibles was named Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Terry McAuliffe.

Seibles lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he is a member of the English Department and MFA in writing faculty of Old Dominion University. He is a teaching board member of the Muse Writers Workshop.

Short Bio

Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award, and One Turn Around The Sun (2017). His latest work of poetry, Voodoo Libretto, will be published by Etruscan Press in 2022. His poems has been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles lives and teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

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