Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Schnackenberg graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1975. She lectured at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University in St. Louis, and was Writer-in-Residence at Smith College and visiting fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1997.{{cite web|url=http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80988|title=Gjertrud Schnackenberg|date=October 27, 2017|publisher=Poetry Foundation|accessdate=October 28, 2017}}

The Throne of Labdacus, one of Schnackenberg's six books of poetry, focuses on the myth of Oedipus and the stories of ancient Greece. In A Gilded Lapse of Time she devotes a section to the life, poetry, and death of Dante.

Schnackenberg has received the Rome Prize in Creative Literature from the American Academy in Rome and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1987 she received a Guggenheim grant. She has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1996. In 1997, she was the Christensen Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and in 2000 she was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. She won an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998, and in 2001 she won the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry for The Throne of Labdacus.{{cite web|url=http://www.fsgpoetry.com/|title=THE BEST WORDS IN THEIR BEST ORDER|website=THE BEST WORDS IN THEIR BEST ORDER|accessdate=October 28, 2017}} In 2011, she won the Griffin Poetry Prize (worth CDN $65,000) for Heavenly Questions.{{cite web|url=http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/gjertrud-schnackenbergs-heavenly-questions-and-dionne-brands-ossuaries-win-the-2011-griffin-poetry-prize/|title=Griffin Poetry Prize – Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions and Dionne Brand's Ossuaries Win the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize|website=Griffin Poetry Prize|accessdate=October 28, 2017|archive-date=October 29, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171029013533/http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/gjertrud-schnackenbergs-heavenly-questions-and-dionne-brands-ossuaries-win-the-2011-griffin-poetry-prize/|url-status=dead}}

Schnackenberg was married to the American philosopher Robert Nozick until his death in 2002.{{cite web |url=http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/01.17/99-nozick.html |title=Harvard Gazette: Philosopher Nozick dies at 63 |accessdate=August 6, 2012 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20120918001743/http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/01.17/99-nozick.html |archivedate=September 18, 2012 }}

Schnackenberg has been awarded the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and the Rome Prize in Creative Literature from the American Academy in Rome, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Radcliffe Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation.{{Cite web|url=http://www.gf.org/fellows/13063-gjertrud-schnackenberg|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110604000216/http://www.gf.org/fellows/13063-gjertrud-schnackenberg|url-status=dead|archive-date=June 4, 2011|title=Gjertrud Schnackenberg – John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation|date=June 4, 2011|access-date=March 14, 2018}} Today, she travels around the world reading her poetry in public, university, and conference settings.

• 2011: Heavenly Questions wins the 2011 International Griffin Poetry Prize
• 2001: Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry
• 2000: The Throne of Labdacus named a "notable book of the year" by The New York Times
• 1998: American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards, Rome Prize in Literature
• 1984–1985: Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship
• 1984 Younger Poets Award from Academy of American Poets{{cite book |title=The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1985 |date=1984 |publisher=Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc. |location=New York |isbn=0-911818-71-5 |page=414}}
• 1974 and 1975: Glascock Prize from Mount Holyoke College{{Cite web|url=http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/csj/041902/poet.shtml|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20021218171533/http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/csj/041902/poet.shtml|url-status=dead|archive-date=December 18, 2002|title=A Look at Glascock Poet Katharine Sapper|date=December 18, 2002|access-date=March 14, 2018}}

• {{Cite book| title=Heavenly Questions | date=2011| publisher=Bloodaxe Books UK | isbn=978-1-85224-922-9 }}
• {{Cite book| title=Heavenly Questions: Poems| date=2010| publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux| isbn=978-0-374-28307-0 }}
• {{Cite book| title=The Throne of Labdacus| url=https://archive.org/details/throneoflabdacus00schn| url-access=registration| date=2000| publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux| isbn= 978-0-374-52796-9 }}
• {{Cite book| title=Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-2000 | date=2001| publisher=Bloodaxe Books UK | isbn=978-1-85224-561-0 }}
• {{Cite book| title=Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992| date=2000| publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux| isbn=978-0-374-52754-9| url=https://archive.org/details/supernaturallove00schn}}
• {{Cite book| title=A Gilded Lapse of Time| date=1992| publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux| isbn=978-0-374-52399-2| url=https://archive.org/details/gildedlapseoftim00gjer}}
• {{Cite book| title=The Lamplit Answer| url=https://archive.org/details/lamplitanswer00schn| url-access=registration| date=1985| publisher=Farrar Straus & Giroux| isbn= 978-0-374-51978-0 }}
• {{Cite book| title=Portraits and Elegies| date=1982| publisher=D.R. Godine| isbn= 978-0-87923-368-6 }}

The poetry of Gjertrud Schnackenberg has always seemed to be written white-on-black, not only because her lines have the tuned quality of work that has absorbed how sheer is the drop from white to black, from utterance to nothing, but also because the well-springs of her art seem connected at some profound level to the witnessing of light against dark or dark against light. These two factors are both the cause and the effect of the work's sustained dignity and strength [...] Schackenberg has rarely seemed in dialogue with any contemporary, and perhaps for this reason she is one of the few American poets whose voice one might recognize in a line [...] Much of her best work, even in the poems that most obviously manifest such width and perspective, is in the exquisite accuracy with which she beholds details, as if the bright child did her true apprenticeship not in the beam of the study lamp, but in the glow of the dollhouse windows.--Glyn Maxwell, The New Republic{{cite web|url=http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/poetryus/schnackj1.htm|title=Supernatural Love – Gjertrud Schnackenberg|first=the complete review – all rights|last=reserved|website=complete-review.com|accessdate=28 October 2017}}

[Schnackenberg's] poems wrestle with moral failure not in the light of philosophy but in the darkness after it. – William Logan, The New Criterion

Gjertrud Schnackenberg stands out among younger American poets for her ambition, in the best sense of the word. Her verse is strong, dense and musical, anchored in the pentameter even when it veers into irregularity; behind it are formidable masters, Robert Lowell most notably, but also Yeats and Auden. Lowellian, too, is her desire to treat history as something more than a stage setting, to make it the medium of thought and feeling. --Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Book Review{{cite news| url=https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/29/books/all-eyes-on-the-snow-globe.html | work=The New York Times | title=All Eyes on the Snow Globe | first=Adam | last=Kirsch | date=October 29, 2000 | accessdate=May 3, 2010}}

{{Reflist}}

• [http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/awards-and-poets/shortlists/2011-shortlist/gjertrud-schnackenberg/ Griffin Poetry Prize biography of Gjertrud Schnackenberg, including video clip]
• [http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2004/april/040104poet-schnackenberg.html Gjertrud Schnackenberg reading at University of Iowa, 2004] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080205234059/http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2004/april/040104poet-schnackenberg.html |date=February 5, 2008 }}
• [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/09/consolations/ "Gjertrud Schnackenberg: Heavenly Questions", The New York Review of Books]
• [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gjertrud-schnackenberg#tab-poems Several Schnackenberg poems at the Poetry Foundation website]

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Category:1953 births

Category:Living people

Category:American people of Norwegian descent

Category:Writers from Tacoma, Washington

Category:Formalist poets

Category:Glascock Prize winners

Category:Mount Holyoke College alumni

Category:American women poets

Category:20th-century American poets

Category:20th-century American women writers

Category:21st-century American poets

Category:21st-century American women writers

Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty

Category:Washington University in St. Louis faculty

Category:Fellows of St Catherine's College, Oxford

Category:Poets from Washington (state)