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| Photo by Nathan Filbert |
Lightning doesn’t often strike twice — but Albert Goldbarth, Wichita State University’s Adele Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities, has won a second National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry for his book Saving Lives, making him the only poet to win the prestigious award twice since the nbcc was founded in 1974.
Goldbarth — described by Judith Kitchen in a past review as a writer who “just may be the American poet of his generation for the ages” — won the 1991 award for poetry for his Heaven and Earth from the nearly 700 book reviewers who comprise the nbcc. Goldbarth has been a member of wsu’s creative writing faculty since 1987, having arrived from the University of Texas at Austin.
Other highlights of his extraordinary writing career include two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Guggenheim and numerous publications — for his essay collections as well as his poetry.
“I hope it’s a nice thing for Wichita as well as myself,” the poet told The Wichita Eagle on March 13, two days after the NBCC awards ceremony in New York.
