Gregory Pardlo, "Air Traffic"

Gregory Pardlo discusses his memoir, "Air Traffic" at Politics and Prose on 4/22/18.

Pardlo won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in 2007 for Totem. His second collection of poems, Digest, was awarded the Pulitzer in 2015. Both books explore questions of race, family, and American culture, themes that recur in this affecting memoir. By turns emotional, analytic, ironic, and angry, the book covers Pardlo’s youth, brief Marine reserves stint, false-starting college career, two marriages, alcoholism, and parenthood. At the heart of all his experiences is Pardlo’s complicated relationship with his father. Both blunt and cryptic, demanding and loving, Pardlo père was one of the 11,000-plus air traffic controllers fired by Reagan in 1981, an event with enduring emotional ramifications for both father and son.

GREGORY PARDLO is the author of Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Digest was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award, named a standout book by the Academy of American Poets, a New York Times best poetry book of the year, and a finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and INDIEFAB Book of the Year. Gregory Pardlo's other awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His first poetry collection, Totem, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two kids.

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Produced by Tom Warren