Nathaniel Mackey

Nathaniel Mackey is an American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Mackey is currently teaching a poetry workshop at Duke University.

He has been editor and publisher of Hambone since 1982 and he won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006. and in 2015 he won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

Poetry Mackey's books of poetry include the chapbooks Four for Trane (1978) and Septet for the End of Time (1983); and the books Eroding Witness (1985), School of Udhra (1993), Whatsaid Serif (1998), Splay Anthem (2006), Nod House (2011), and Blue Fasa (2016), as well as the books Tej Bet, So's Notice, and Nerve Church, which were published together as a boxed set called Double Trio in 2021. In 2016, Black Ocean Books published a collection called Lay Ghost that featured songs that later appeared in So's Notice.

"...Mackey's series of improvisatory jazz-inspired fictions locates a ground between invention and listening that he defines as the source of culture itself. All culture, for Mackey, is a form of listening to what "we" are collectively improvising." Barrett Watten Mackey's poetry combines African mythology, African-American musical traditions, and Modernist poetic experiment. His ongoing serial projects, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu", explore the relationship of poetry and historical memory, as well the dissonance between his American context and those of Africa and the Middle-East.

Fiction Mackey has published five volumes of an ongoing prose project entitled From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. The books are titled Bedouin Hornbook (1986), Djbot Baghostus's Run (1993), Atet A. D. (2001), Bass Cathedral (2008), and Late Arcade (2017).

Bedouin Hornbook was inspired by the experience of seeing a jazz ensemble in which he was the only person in the audience. His series of letters explores playing in a band like that. The book is also the first in the “Broken Bottle” series. an influential book of literary theory, and more recently of Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (2004). He co-edited Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose with Art Lange (1993).

Personal life At Stanford, Mackey met Gloria Jean Watkins (bell hooks), whom he dated until the mid 1980s. He married Pascale Gaitet, a specialist in French literature, in 1991. The couple later had three children: Naima, Gabriella, and Ian. 2007 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize 2015 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry 2016 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for Lifetime Achievement

Works Poetry Collections

The last three issued in a box set as:

Fiction

The first three issued in one volume as:

The following two individual volumes are volumes 4 and 5 of From a Broken Bottle traces of Perfume Still Emanate

Essays

(1993), Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (2018), Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews

Resources