G.C. Waldrep was born in the small town of South Boston, Va., in 1968, and currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He holds degrees in American history from Harvard and Duke and a MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. His first book of poems, Goldbeater's Skin, won the 2003 Colorado Prize for Poetry as well as a Greenwall Award from The Academy of American Poets. His other collections of poetry include Disclamor (2007) and Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize. A 2007 National Endownment for the Arts fellow in Literature, Waldrep has also recieved a 2008 Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry. His newest collection of poems, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, was co-written with John Gallaher almost entirely through email. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, among many journals. He has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Campbell Corner Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is also the author of a nonfiction book, Southern Workers and the Search for Community (University of Illinois Press, 2000), which won the 2001 Illinois Prize for History.
He teaches at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where he directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.
