Bradford Morrow
Encyclopedia
Bradford Morrow is an American
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...

 novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children's book writer. Professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College
Bard College
Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...

, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions
Conjunctions
Conjunctions, is a biannual American literary journal based at Bard College. It was founded in 1981 and is currently edited by Bradford Morrow....

 literary magazine.

Life

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 8, 1951, Morrow grew up in Littleton, Colorado
Littleton, Colorado
Littleton is a Home Rule Municipality contained in Arapahoe, Douglas, and Jefferson counties in the U.S. state of Colorado. Littleton is a suburb of the Denver-Aurora Metropolitan Statistical Area. Littleton is the county seat of Arapahoe County and the 20th most populous city in the state of...

, and, "after a decade of vagabonding from Honduras to France, Italy to England", settled in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, where he remains. In 1966, he was selected by the Colorado Medical Association to serve with a small number of other teenage volunteers as a medical assistant with the Amigos de las Americas
Amigos de las Américas
Amigos de las Américas is a nonprofit organization based in Houston, Texas that creates opportunities for high school and college-age students to collaborate with local communities in leadership roles to promote public health, education, and community development throughout the Americas...

 program, giving inoculations and working with health-care professionals in poor, very rural areas in Honduras. The following year, 1967–1968, Morrow was a foreign exchange student under the auspices of the American Field Service, completing his final year of high school at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo
Cuneo
Cuneo is a city and comune in Piedmont, Northern Italy, the capital of the province of Cuneo, the third largest of Italy’s provinces by area...

, Italy. After completing his B.A. in English Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, 1969–1972, where he graduated summa cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa, he received a Danforth Fellowship to continue graduate studies in English and comparative literature at Yale University. Upon leaving Yale, Morrow moved first to Ithaca, New York, where he began research on a full-scale bibliography of Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...

, consulting the archives at Cornell University, and then to Santa Barbara, California, where he met John Martin, of Black Sparrow Press, who would publish the bibliography in 1978.

The literary biannual journal Conjunctions was conceived in late 1980 as "Morrow sat in Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth's
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...

 library in Santa Barbara, California
Santa Barbara, California
Santa Barbara is the county seat of Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Situated on an east-west trending section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coast of the United States, the city lies between the steeply-rising Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific Ocean...

. The two friends had the idea to assemble a Festschrift for James Laughlin
James Laughlin
James Laughlin was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishers.- Biography :He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry Hughart and Marjory Rea Laughlin...

, the beloved editor of New Directions." After being published by David R. Godine
David R. Godine
David R. Godine is the founder and president of David R. Godine, Inc., a small publishing house located in Boston, Massachusetts. The company is independent and its list tends to reflect the individual tastes of its president....

 (1985–1987) and Collier Books/Scribner (1988–1989), the journal was picked up by Bard College
Bard College
Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...

 in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Annandale-on-Hudson is a hamlet in Dutchess County, New York, USA, in the Hudson Valley in the town of Red Hook, across the Hudson River from Kingston....

, which remains the journal's publisher.

Morrow became Rexroth's literary executor in 1982, and has edited and introduced a number of the poet’s books, including The Selected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (1984), Classics Revisited (1986), World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (1987), More Classics Revisited (1989), and with Sam Hamill coedited The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002).

He has taught at Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, Brown
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

, and Columbia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 Universities, as well as the Naropa Institute. Since 1990 he has been a professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College
Bard College
Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...

.

The Review of Contemporary Fiction published a "Bradford Morrow issue" in 2000
2000 in literature
The year 2000 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* February 13 - Final original Peanuts comic strip is published...

, which included essays by Sven Birkerts, Forrest Gander, Patrick McGrath, Robert Creeley, Joanna Scott, Brian Evenson, William T. Vollmann, Maureen Howard, and others.

Awards and honors

  • Guggenheim Fellowship (2007)

  • PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing (2007)

From the judges’ citation: “We were astonished to discover that Bradford Morrow has not already won this award, after 25 years of editing almost by himself one of our most distinctive and valuable literary magazines. We saw this year as a chance to correct that oversight. The range of writers he publishes (and often discovers) is a sort of who's who of 20th/21st century serious writing, and he's found a way to keep reinventing it. The fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, and art is sometimes described as 'experimental,' but we would also say innovative, daring, indispensable, and beautiful. Our best writers manifestly trust Bradford Morrow with their most ambitious work, and we can think of no higher praise for a literary magazine, or its editor.”
  • O. Henry Prize for short story “Lush” (2003
    2003 in literature
    The year 2003 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-New books:*Peter Ackroyd - The Clerkenwell Tales*Atsuko Asano - No...

    )

  • Academy Award for Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998)

  • Member, board of trustees, PEN American Center (1998–2002) and chair of the PEN Forums Committee

Novels

  • Come Sunday (1988
    1988 in literature
    The year 1988 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-New books:*Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye*J.G. Ballard - Memories of the Space Age*Iain M...

    ; later republished)
  • The Almanac Branch (Finalist for the 1992 PEN/Faulkner Award; 1991
    1991 in literature
    The year 1991 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Douglas Coupland publishes the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularizing the term Generation X as the name of the generation....

    )
  • Trinity Fields (Finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award; first volume of his "New Mexico Trilogy")
  • Giovanni's Gift (1997
    1997 in literature
    The year 1997 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Tom Clancy signs a book deal with Pearson Custom Publishing and Penguin Putnam Inc. , giving him US$50 million for the world-English rights to two new books . A second agreement gives him another US$25 million for a...

    )
  • Ariel’s Crossing (Second volume of his "New Mexico Trilogy"; 2002
    2002 in literature
    The year 2002 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*March 16: Authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested and jailed poet Abdul Mohsen Musalam and fired a newspaper editor following the publication of Musalam's poem The Corrupt on Earth that criticized the state's Islamic...

    )
  • The Diviner's Tale (2011)

Books for Children

  • A Bestiary (Illustrated by 18 contemporary artists including Gregory Amenoff, Joe Andoe, James Brown, Vija Celmins, Louisa Chase, Eric Fischl, Jan Hashey, Michael Hurson, Mel Kendrick, James Nares, Ellen Phelan, Joel Shapiro, Kiki Smith, David Storey, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, Trevor Winkfield, and Robin Winters. New York: Grenfell Press, 1991)
  • Didn’t Didn’t Do It (Illustrated by Gahan Wilson. New York: Putnam, 2007)

Literary Journal

  • Conjunctions
    Conjunctions
    Conjunctions, is a biannual American literary journal based at Bard College. It was founded in 1981 and is currently edited by Bradford Morrow....

    (Founder and editor of biannual literary journal. Fall 1981–present)

Anthologies (as Editor)

  • The New Gothic (Coedited with Patrick McGrath. New York: Random House, 1991
    1991 in literature
    The year 1991 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Douglas Coupland publishes the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularizing the term Generation X as the name of the generation....

    )
  • The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Co-edited with David Shields. Forthcoming from W. W. Norton
    W. W. Norton
    W. W. Norton & Company is an independent American book publishing company based in New York City. It is well known for its "Norton Anthologies", particularly the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the "Norton Critical Editions" series of texts which are frequently assigned in university...

    , Winter 2011)

Anthologies: Short Stories and Novel Excerpts (as contributor)

  • The Night Watch. The Literary Insomniac: Stories and Essays for Sleepless Nights (Eds. Elyse Cheney and Wendy Hubbert. New York: Doubleday, 1996)
  • from The Almanac Branch. The Book of Love. (Eds. Diane Ackerman and Jeanne Mackin. New York: Norton, 1998)
  • A Different Kind of Arbor. Hover (Photographs by Gregory Crewdson and text by Rick Moody, Darcey Steinke, Joyce Carol Oates, and Bradford Morrow. San Francisco: Artspace Books, 1998)
  • For Brother Robert. A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell (Ed. Jonathan Safran Foer. New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publisher, 2001)
  • The Hoarder. "The Best American Noir of the Century" (Eds. James Ellroy and Otto Penzler. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)

Anthologies: Essays and Interviews (as contributor)

  • Psalms. Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in their Lives (Ed. David Rosenberg. New York: Anchor, 1998)
  • The Journey to Trinity. The Place Within: Portraits of the American Landscape by Contemporary Writers" (Ed. Jodi Daynard. New York: Norton, 1997)
  • Bradford Morrow. Bomb: Speak Fiction and Poetry (Interviewed by Jim Lewis. Ed. Betsy Sussler. New York: New Art Publications, 1998)

Books of Poems

  • After a Charme, (New York: Grenfell Press, 1984)
  • The Preferences, (New York: Grenfell Press, 1983)
  • Danae's Progress, (San Francisco: Cadmus Editions/Arion Press, 1982)
  • Posthumes, (Santa Barbara: Cadmus Editions, 1982)
  • Passing From the Provinces, (Santa Barbara: Cadmus Editions, 1981)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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