Campbell McGrath biography

Campbell McGrath Biography

Born in Chicago to Irish-Catholic parents, Campbell McGrath earned his BA from the University of Chicago and MFA from Columbia University. Influenced by Walt Whitman, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Rainer Maria Rilke, McGrath writes predominantly free-verse, long-lined, documentary poems deeply engaged with American popular culture and commerce. A master of the long poem, he has also written many prose poems as well as shorter lyrics.

McGrath has published numerous collections of poetry, including Spring Comes to Chicago (1996), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In awarding the prize, poet Garrett Hongo labeled McGrath's unique tone "ironic romanticism." The centerpiece of the collection, and one of McGrath's best-known poems is The Bob Hope Poem, a 70-page opus modeled on Robert Pinsky's "An Explanation of America" and James McMichael's "Four Good Things."

McGrath's many books of poetry include Capitalism (1990); American Noise (1994); Florida Poems (2002); Pax Atomica (2005); Seven Notebooks (2007); and In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (2012). McGrath's work typically works as a kind of catalog; its long lines attempt to look at the vast complexity of America and penetrate its paradoxes and attractions.

McGrath is also the co-translator of Aristophanes's The Wasps (1999). He has won a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares literary journal, and a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1999), The New American Poets (2000), and Great American Prose Poems (2003).

McGrath has taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Florida International University.

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