Gregory Pardlo

Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA Rutgers University-Camden; MFA NYU; MFA Columbia University; MPhil CUNY Graduate Center

Research Areas: Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Translation, African American Literature, Literary Criticism


Gregory Pardlo is a graduate of Rutgers University-Camden. He received an MFA from NYU as a New York Times Fellow in Poetry, an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University as a Teaching Fellow, and an MPhil from the CUNY Graduate Center. Pardlo is the author of Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Totem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Review / Honickman Prize; and translator from the Danish of Niels Lyngsø’s, Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace. Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, was published by Knopf in 2018. His most recent book, Spectral Evidence, was long listed for the 2024 National Book Award in poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and two editions of Best American Poetry, as well as many anthologies including the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a fellowship for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received other fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, MacDowell, the Lotos Club Foundation and Cave Canem. Pardlo is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and advising editor for Callaloo, a journal of African diaspora arts and letters.

Courses Taught