Eugene Gloria
BIOGRAPHY
Eugene Gloria is the author of four books of poems—Sightseer in This Killing City (Penguin Random House, 2019); My Favorite Warlord (Penguin, 2012), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Hoodlum Birds (Penguin, 2006); and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel (Penguin, 2000), a National Poetry Series selection and recipient of the Asian American Literary Award. His honors include a Fulbright Research Grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Poetry Society of America Award, and a Fulbright Lecturer Award, among others. He has also received fellowships for residencies at MacDowell, Montalvo Arts Center, Wilapata Bay AiR, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Château de Lavigny, Fundación Valparaíso, and Yaddo. He is the John Rabb Emison Professor of Creative and Performing Arts and English Professor at DePauw University.
PROJECT
Eugene Gloria regards writing as part of the process of self-discovery. His current collection of poems explores the brief life of a Filipino polymath and national hero named José Rizal. Drawing on personal history and collective memory, these poems reflect on Rizal’s life as a flâneur, student, and writer from his perspective as well as that of his wife, Josephine Bracken, and Juan Tamad, a fictional character from Filipino folklore. Time and its fluidity are central themes in Gloria’s works, as are love, death, and poetry itself. In his poems, Rizal, as a historical figure, allows Gloria to examine not only the Philippines’ centuries of Spanish colonization, but also the price of freedom then and now. While at Nawat Fes, Gloria will be working on new poems, drawing from texts and images from a winter term course he co-led on the arts, architecture, and religions of Morocco (touring Fes, Marrakech, Casablanca, Tangier, Chefchaouen, Meknes, Volubilis, Rabat, and Essaouira). In Dar Bennis, Gloria will deepen his exploration of Fes as one interrogates a character in a living, breathing story.