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Tom Sleigh
Poet and Distinguished Professor, Hunter College
Biography
Tom Sleigh, a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, is an American poet, dramatist, and essayist. He has published eight books of poetry, a translation of Euripides’ Herakles, and a book of essays. Five of his plays have been produced. He has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the John Updike Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, an Individual Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace Fund, an Artists Foundation Award in Playwrighting from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He currently serves as director of Hunter College’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing and has previously taught at Dartmouth College, University of Iowa, University of California at Berkley, Johns Hopkins University, and New York University. Sleigh’s poems frequently appear in the New Yorker and other publications.
American Academy Project
New Poems
While at the American Academy in Berlin, Sleigh hopes to complete a new book as well as put together a selection of poems. Sleigh aims in his work for a music of clashing tones, a music that can express the difference between what one ought to feel and what one really does feel—not iron smashing against iron, so to speak, but the difference between exploring a political emotion rather than a political conviction. To do that in poetry, he argues, a person has to keep himself open to lots of different frequencies, so that whatever ethical statement you arrive at itself arrives as part of the texture of the poem. The language relieves the poet of having to stand guard over his own opinions and convictions, gives him access to reaches of thought and feeling perhaps otherwise not imagined. Such a stance, Sleigh avers, is risky, unpredictable, and not always easy to reconcile with day-to-day political, emotional, or intellectual entanglements. As to our private lives, as Elizabeth Bishop defined it, Sleigh is interested in “the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life.”