Gregory Pardlo Reads “Winter After the Strike”

Gregory Pardlo is an award-winning poet and essayist. His collection Digest won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2015.

He was born in Philadelphia in 1968 and raised in Willingboro, NJ. His father lost his job as an air traffic controller in the strike of 1981, an experience Pardlo revisited in his 2018 memoir Air Traffic. He served in the U.S. Marine Corp and studied English at Rutgers University–Camden. He completed MFAs at New York University and Columbia University and is a doctoral student at the City University of New York.

Known for his evocative yet concrete verse, Pardlo published his debut collection of poetry, Totem, in 2007, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize the following year. His Pulitzer-winning sophomore work, Digest (2015), was shortlisted for the 2015 NAACP Image Award. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and The Best American Poetry anthologies, among other publications.

Pardlo is poetry editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, associate editor of Callaloo, and a professor of English at Rutgers.