Biography
Tony Trigilio is a Professor in the English and Creative Writing Department. He teaches courses in Creative Writing, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies. He is the author and editor of sixteen books, including, most recently, Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press, 2023); The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation, co-edited with Erik Mortenson (Clemson University Press, 2023); Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize (Marsh Hawk, 2021); and Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX [books], 2019), the third installment in his multivolume cross-genre project, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). A volume of his selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). His books of poetry also include Inside the Walls of My Own House (BlazeVOX, 2016), White Noise (Apostrophe Books, 2013) and Historic Diary (BlazeVOX, 2011), among others. Trigilio is the author of Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) and "Strange Prophecies Anew": Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014), and coeditor of Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2008). A musician as well as a writer, he played in Pet Theories from 2012-2016, and he recorded and toured as a member of Drumming on Glass. He received a 2009 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, and is a past recipient of Faculty Development Grants, a Technology Fellows Grant, and a Curriculum Diversity Grant from Columbia College Chicago. He was Columbia College Chicago Distinguished Scholar from 2009-2011. Trigilio chaired Columbia's Creative Writing Department from 2015-2017, and he directed Columbia's Poetry Programs (BA and MFA) from 2006-2009 and 2012-2015. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Northeastern University.
Instructional Areas
Creative Writing (Poetry), Literary Studies, Cultural Studies
Creative Practice and Research Interests
Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century US Poetry, Beat Generation Literature, Immigration Literature, Anglo-American Romanticism, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
Degrees
B.A., English Kent State University 1988
M.A., English Northeastern University 1990
Ph.D., English Northeastern University 1997