Mr. John R.O. Gery

Research Professor
MA, University of Chicago, 1976
MA, Stanford University, 1978

Originally from Lititz, Pennsylvania, John Gery is a poet and critic of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as a collaborative translator of poetry. After teaching at Stanford and San Jose State Universities, he first joined UNO as an Instructor in 1979. He is a member of both the Creative Writing MFA and Women's Studies faculties. His courses have included Poetry Writing, Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Poetics, Women's Poetry, Caribbean Poetry, British and American literature, Poetry and Drama, and Composition, as well as single author courses. He has also taught at the University of Iowa. In 1990 he received the UNO Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching and in 1997 was honored with the English Department's Outstanding Service Award.

Since 1990 John has served as the founding Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg, Dorf Tirol, Italy, a biannual summer program with seminars on the poetry of Ezra Pound and poetry writing, conducted at a castle in the Italian Alps where Pound once lived, now the home of Pound's daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, and her family. In 2005 John was elected Secretary of the Ezra Pound International Conference and as Convener of the 2007 conference in Venice. John has also taught at the University of Iowa (1991, 1993) and been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota (2006). He has been Poet-in-Residence at Bucknell University (2001, 03, 06) and was the 2006 Annadora Gregory Lecturer at Doane College, Nebraska. He has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Belgrade (Serbia) for Spring 2007.

John's poetry, criticism, and reviews have appeared in literary and academic journals throughout the country, as well as in Europe, including Callaloo, Contemporary Literature, Dark Horse, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Louisiana Literature, New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, Paideuma, Paris Review, South Central Review, Southwest Review, and Verse. For his work, he has received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991-92), an Artist Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts (2002), two Deep South Writers Poetry Awards (1983, 1987), and a European Award of the Circle Franz Kafka in Prague (2000), among other awards. His collection of poems, The Enemies of Leisure, received a Critic's Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books and was named a Best Book of 1995 in poetry by Publisher's Weekly. His poems have been translated into Serbian, Chinese, Romanian, and Bengali.

In addition to writing poetry, John has collaborated on poetry translations with others, including (from Armenian) Vahe Baladouni, (from Serbian) Biljana D. Obradovic, and (from Chinese) Xiaobin Yang. His research interests have included contemporary poetry, political ideology, and the threat of nuclear war. Currently, he is researching American poetry at the turn of the twenty-first century and issues of cultural identity. He is also completing a new collection of poems, as well as a walking guide to Pound's Venice.

Selected Publications:

Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures (Plumbers Ink, 1983)
The Burning of New Orleans (Amelia, 1988)
The Enemies of Leisure (Story Line, 1995)
Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness
(Florida, 1996)
For the House of Torkom: Armenian prose poems of Hmayyag Shems (co-trans. with
Vahe Baladouni, Cross-Cultural, 1999)
American Ghost/Americki Duh (bilingual, trans. by Biljana D. Obradovic,
Cross-Cultural, 1999)
Davenport's Version (Portals Press, 2003)
A Gallery of Ghosts (forthcoming from Story Line Press)

Phone Number:
(504) 280-6361

Email Mr. Gery@
jgery@uno.edu

Address: Liberal Arts Building 365

Office Hours:

MW 12:30-1:30
W 9:00-9:30am; 4:30-6:00pm
TTH 12:30-2:30pm

Courses for Fall 2009:

Engl 1157-021:
Freshman Composition I
MW 1:30-2:45pm

Engl 4163-001:
Advanced Poetry Writing
MW 3:00-4:15pm

Engl 6163-601:
Writing Poetry
W 6:00-8:40pm