Gray Jacobik

Gray Jacobik earned her Ph.D. in American and British Literature from Brandeis University under the tutelage of Allen Grossman. She holds the rank of University Professor Emerita at Eastern Connecticut State University. A widely published and anthologized poet, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and an Artist’s Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Jacobik’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 1997 and 1999, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ontario Review, The Georgia Review, Connecticut Review and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is the 1997 winner of The Yeats Prize given by The Yeats Society of New York, and of The Emily Dickinson Award sponsored by Universities West Press. Her book, The Double Task (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998) received the Juniper Prize (selected by James Tate) and was nominated for the James Laughlin Award and the Poet’s Prize. The Surface of Last Scattering (Texas Review Press, 1999) was chosen by X. J. Kennedy as the winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Brave Disguises received the AWP Poetry Series Award for 2001 and is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Gray served as the Robert Frost Poet-in-Residence at the Frost Place during the summer of 2002. For nearly a decade she mentored graduate students through the Stonecoast MFA Program (University of Southern Maine). Jacobik is the author of Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse (CavanKerry Press, 2011) and received the 2016 William Meredith Award in Poetry for The Banquet: New & Selected Poems (Poets’ Choice, 2016). The Banquet was nominated for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer. In 2017 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the literature of Connecticut from The Connecticut Center for the Book and The Connecticut Humanities Council. She is an award-winning painter as well as a poet. For more information about her work in poetry, please visit grayjacobik.com. For information about her work as an artist, visit grayjacobikartist.com.