Gregory Pardlo was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey. He is the author of Digest (2014), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.” Pardlo’s poems, reviews, and translations have been widely published and are noted for “language simultaneously urban and highbrow … snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.” He is an associate editor for the literary journal Callaloo and teaches creative writing at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.
More By This Poet
Double Dutch
The girls turning double-dutch
bob & weave like boxers pulling
punches, shadowing each other,
sparring across the slack cord
casting parabolas in the air. They
whip quick as an infant’s pulse
and the jumper, before she
enters the winking, nods in time
as if she has a notion...
Written by Himself
I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skilletwhispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye;
I was born across the river where I
was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,
broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though
it...