Tom Sleigh, professional biography
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Tom Sleigh is the author of seven books of poetry, After One (winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series Prize, l983), Waking (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poetry Series, l990), which was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the Notable Books of 1990-91 and was a finalist for the Lamont Poetry Prize, and The Chain, also published by the University of Chicago Press in March, l996. The Chain was nominated for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets and The Nation Magazine. His fourth book, The Dreamhouse, (Chicago, November 1999) was a selection of the Academy of American Poet’s Poetry Book Club and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His fifth book, Far Side of the Earth, was published by Houghton Mifflin (April 3, 2003), and named an Honor Book by the Massachusetts Society for the Book. His sixth book, Bula Matari/Smasher of Rocks was published in a limited edition by Arrowsmith. And his new book, Space Walk, was published by Houghton Mifflin in March, 2007.
Among his many awards are the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a three year Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund. He has also received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown where he is currently a Writing Committee member. He has published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Paris Review, Grand Street, Partisan Review, The Boston Review, Poetry, Slate, TriQuarterly, DoubleTake, Tin House, Agni and many other literary magazines. His work has been widely anthologized, including in The Norton Introduction to Poetry, 7th ed, and Poems to Read, edited by Robert Pinsky and published by Norton.
Tom Sleigh's book of personal and literary essays, Interview With a Ghost, was published in 2006 from Graywolf Press.
As a dramatist, his translation of Euripides' Herakles was published by Oxford University Press in January 2001. His play, Ahab's Wife, was performed in 1997 at the Loeb's ART Institute in Boston and was featured in the Jim Henson Foundation's International Festival of Puppet Theater in New York City in September 1998. His play, Barbarosa, was given a staged reading in the spring of 1998 at Boston University's Playwright's Theater. Rubber, his new play, was selected to be read and developed as part of the Hudson Exploited Theater Company's Where Theater Starts project. Rubber was produced this July—August, 2002, by the Hudson Exploited Theater Company as part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival in New York City at Raw Space. Rubber was selected to be part of "Best of the Fest" by the festival sponsors and also won a 2003 OOBR Award from the Off Off Broadway Review. Sleigh was also a Literary Associate at the Market Theater in Cambridge, MA. He received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Playwrighting in May 2003. His play, The Knowledge and Conversation of My Holy Guardian Angel, or an Old-Fashioned Love Story, was produced in 2004 in New York City's annual Fringe Theater Festival. He also received a grant from the LEF Foundation of New England to complete Trojan Horse. And his multi-media opera, Ice Trucker Pilgrimage, was presented at the 2006 San Franciso Film Festival, and will be presented in 2007 at Roulette in New York City, and at the Ghent New Music Festival in Belgium. Recently, he has been interviewed in 32 Poems and in Blackbird, which also published his poems "Station Zed" and "KM4"; Poetry published seven of his new poems, one of which, "The Animals in the Zoo Don't Seem Worried," got picked up by NPR.
He has read his poems at universities, colleges, and literary centers nationwide, notably for the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the Library of Congress. He has taught at NYU, Iowa, Johns Hopkins University, and is currently director of the Hunter College MFA Program in Creative Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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