Tim Seibles

(Poetry Craft Labs, Faculty Reading)

Tim Seibles, the former Poet Laureate of Virginia, was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books of poetry including Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, and Buffalo Head Solos. His first collection, Body Moves, (1988) was re-released by the Carnegie Mellon University Press as part of their Contemporary Classics series. Fast Animal was one of five poetry finalists for the 2012 National Book Award. In 2013 he received the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for poetry. In 2014 Tim received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Misericordia University for his literary accomplishments. During that same year, he won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award for Fast Animal, a prize given triennially for a collection of poems. In 2015, he chaired the panel of judges that decided the winner of the National Book Award in poetry. One Turn Around the Sun was published in 2017. His most recent collection, Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems, was released in 2022.

He has been a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and was also awarded a writing fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts. Tim spent a semester as poet-in-residence at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. His poetry has been featured in several anthologies: Rainbow Darkness; Uncommon Core; Autumn House Contemporary American Poetry; Black Nature; Far Out: Poems of the 60s; Villanelles; and With Our Eyes Wide Open, among others. Over the past decade, his poems have been published in three Best American Poetry anthologies. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Furious Flower Poetry Center in 2024.

He has been a workshop leader for Cave Canem, a writer’s retreat for African American poets, and for the Hurston/Wright Foundation, another organization dedicated to developing black writers. Tim Seibles lives in Norfolk, Virginia and is now an Emeritus Professor of English of Old Dominion University where he taught classes for both the English Department and the MFA in writing program. 

More at www.timseibles.com.