David Kirby

David Kirby (born 1944) is an American poet and the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University (FSU).

Biography

Early life Kirby was raised in "the rural south" by a polyglot "medievalist college professor" father with an obsessive passion for the works of Chaucer and a "farm-girl" mother turned elementary school teacher and, in 1969, a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University with a thesis on Henry James.

Literary criticism Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation (University of Georgia Press, 2007) What is a Book? (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2002) Mark Strand and the Poet's Place in Contemporary Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990) Writing Poetry: Where Poems Come from and How to Write Them (Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1989)

Biography Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009) Herman Melville (New York: Crossroad/Continuum, 1993)

Recognition In his capacity both as poet and as professor, Kirby has been the recipient of multiple awards and honors at the institutional, state, and national levels.

The Florida Arts Council awarded him four separate grants in 1983–2002. In 1985, he was awarded a grant by The National Endowment for the Arts and in 2003, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2016, he won the Florida Humanities Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing. and receiving the FSU Distinguished Teacher Award in 2006.

Billy Collins has stated that he considers Kirby "one of the most engaging and original voices on the American poetry scene today," claiming that he "could recognize a Kirby poem on the page across a room, just as [he] could recognize one of Emily Dickinson’s."