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.

Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida and moved to California at age three when his parents split.

As a teen, he started listening to jazz at his brother's suggestion, which later influenced his work.

He visited Princeton University as a high school student along with Gene Washington where he was able to see live jazz in Manhattan.

The trip was instrumental in the decision to attend the university.

After he graduated with a BA, he returned to Southern California to teach algebra at a junior high school.

In 1970, Mackey enrolled in Stanford University for his doctorate.

His dissertation was about the Black Mountain poets and the poetry they created with the human rhythms of breath and utterance.

In 1974, Mackey became an editor of the poetry journal Hambone, later becoming the sole editor and publisher in 1982.

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.

After graduation, he taught at University of Wisconsin and the University of Southern California before moving on to the literature department at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1979.

At Stanford, Mackey met Gloria Jean Watkins (Bell hooks), whom he dated until the mid 1980s.

He has been editor and publisher of Hambone since 1982 and he won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006.

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.

He married Pascale Gaitet, a specialist in French literature, in 1991.

The couple later had three children: Naima, Gabriella, and Ian.

Mackey is the author of Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993), 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).

He held that position until 2010 when he moved with his family to North Carolina to take a position at Duke University.

In 2014, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and in 2015 he won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

In 2016, Black Ocean Books published a collection called Lay Ghost that featured songs that later appeared in So's Notice.

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.

Mackey has published five volumes of an ongoing prose project entitled From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.