The Frost Place is pleased to announce this year’s Gregory Pardlo Fellow at the Frost Place Poetry Seminar, Amanda Gunn.
About Amanda Gunn
Amanda Gunn’s debut poetry collection, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body, was published by Copper Canyon Press. Raised in Connecticut, she worked as a medical copyeditor for 13 years before earning an MFA in poetry from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. She is the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is currently a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard; her dissertation project, Against Idiom, examines formal experimentation, aesthetic disruption, and political activism in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.
A Poem
FATHER AT TABLE
There was what he demanded with one word
and a pointing finger—“chicken,” “cornbread,”
“‘tatoes”—the delicacies his labor both purchased
and prepared us, all his long hours ours. Trying
not to interrupt the table talk that had snapped
shut and refused him. Not vain, not white folk,
he asked only one courtesy: no swearing
he could hear. He was a Christian and my father.
That godforsaken finger. How stingy it seemed
then. Now how tender, how pleading. How I bristled
at the soft of his voice, an engine rumbling under
the hood of our attention. And, oh, what kindness
I held back, expecting things he would never ask
of me: wait your turn, say thank you, say please.
From Things I Didn’t Do With This Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2023).
On Being Named Pardlo Fellow
“I have been reading and admiring Gregory Pardlo’s work for years and have considered him one of my teachers-on-the-page since my earliest MFA days. When I feel the knack for poetry has escaped me, when the music of the poem is elusive, when I feel myself to be in a state of estrangement from the blank page, when my mind feels dull and unable to contain everything the poem demands, I find myself returning to Gregory’s work. And, reading it, I think—yes, this, this is how “to poet.” I’ve been trying to articulate to myself precisely what it is about his poems that produce this response, one that feels something like relief. Is it the way his poems dwell in the sensorium, everything tactile, tastable? Is it the radically different registers of language he lets into each poem or even each syntactical unit? Is it the way his poems are so diversely peopled? Or is it the way he experiments with voice and self-hood, with interiority and agency? All of these and more. Being named a Gregory Pardlo Fellow for the Frost Place Poetry Seminar feels, for me, like a particularly special blessing on my project because I have been quietly learning from Gregory Pardlo throughout my entire career. I offer my deepest gratitude and look forward to diving into the seminar this August.”
Amanda Gunn
About the Fellowship
The Gregory Pardlo Fellow at the Frost Place Poetry Seminar winner receives a full scholarship to attend the Seminar and gives a featured reading. The fellowship was established in recognition of Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Frost Place faculty member. We are deeply grateful to an anonymous donor who has funded this program since its inception in 2015, and to Gregory Pardlo for nominating our fellows.