Gregory Pardlo

Program Head, Literature and Creative Writing; Visiting Associate Professor of Practice in Literature & Creative Writing Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA Rutgers University-Camden; MFA-Poetry NYU; MFA-Nonfiction Columbia University

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


Gregory Pardlo is a graduate of Rutgers University-Camden. As an undergraduate, he managed the small jazz club his grandfather owned in nearby Pennsauken, NJ. He received an MFA from NYU as a New York Times Fellow in Poetry and an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University as a Teaching Fellow. 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. 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 anthologies including Angles of Ascent, 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. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays published by Knopf in 2018. 

Courses Taught