Nathaniel Mackey

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. 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. He held that position until 2010 when he moved with his family to North Carolina to take a position at Duke University.{{Cite magazine|last=Hsu|first=Hua|title=Nathaniel Mackey's Long Song|url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/12/nathaniel-mackeys-long-song|access-date=2021-04-10|magazine=The New Yorker|language=en-us}}

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 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.{{cite book |last=Carbery |first=Matthew |title=Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem | publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |year=2019 }}

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.

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

Mackey is the author of Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993),{{cite book |last=Mackey |first=Nathaniel |title=Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1993 }} an influential book of literary theory, and more recently of Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (2004).{{cite book |last=Mackey |first=Nathaniel |title=Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews |publisher=University of Wisconsin Press |year=2004 }} He co-edited Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose with Art Lange (1993).{{cite book |editor-last1=Lange |editor-first1=Art |editor-last2=Mackey |editor-first2=Nathaniel |title=Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose | publisher=Coffee House Press | year=1992 }}

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.

• 1993 Whiting Award
• 2006 National Book Award, Poetry, for Splay Anthem

[https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-2006 "National Book Awards – 2006"]. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-04-08.
(With acceptance speech by Mackey, essay by Megan Snyder-Camp from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog, and other materials.)

• 2007 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award
• 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
• 2015 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry[http://news.yale.edu/2015/02/02/nathaniel-mackey-wins-yale-s-2015-bollingen-prize-poetry-0 "Nathaniel Mackey wins Yale’s 2015 Bollingen Prize for Poetry"] Yale News. Retrieved 10 February 2015.
• 2016 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for Lifetime Achievement

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• [http://cordite.org.au/essays/the-oceans-tide/ The Ocean’s Tide: Parentheses in Kamau Brathwaite’s and Nathaniel Mackey’s Decolonial Poetics] at Cordite Poetry Review
• [http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/468 Mackey's page at The Academy of American Poets]
• [http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/mackey/ Mackey's EPC author page]
• [http://www.groovdigit.com/authors/mackey/index.html Groovedigit's Mackey page]
• [http://www.whiting.org/awards/winners/nathaniel-mackey#/ Profile at The Whiting Foundation]
• [http://www.literaturfestival.com/bios1_3_6_774.html Author Page at Internationales Literatufestival Berlin] Mackey was a Guest of the ILB ( Internationales Literatufestival Berlin / Germany ) in 2005
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20180808012118/http://www.add-verse.info/ "Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project Mackey participated in]
• [https://rose.library.emory.edu/ Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library], Emory University: [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/g2b9w Nathaniel Mackey papers, 1947-2011]

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Category:1947 births

Category:Living people

Category:African-American novelists

Category:National Book Award winners

Category:American male novelists

Category:American male poets

Category:American literary critics

Category:Writers from Miami

Category:African-American poets

Category:21st-century African-American writers

Category:20th-century African-American writers