Biography
Reading the Water, Tulip Farms & Leper Colonies, Amplified
Dog, and the Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, which
he edited. Shadow Ball: New & Selected Poems is
forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Among Webb's awards are the Morse Poetry Prize, the Kate
Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, the
Benjamin Saltman Prize, a Whiting Writer's Award, and a
Guggenheim fellowship. His poems have appeared in American
Poetry Review, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares,
Michigan Quarterly Review, Poets of the New Century, Best
American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize. A former rock
singer/guitarist, he is a licensed psychotherapist, and
directs the MFA Program at California State University,
Long Beach.
Coming Soon in September, 2009 is.... Shadow Ball! New and Selected Poems
"For over two decades I've been reading, with great pleasure, the utterly unique poems of Charles Harper Webb. Operating somewhere between the lyric and the narrative--that rich grasslands where absolute clarity and reverberant mystery can happily exist-- Shadow Ball shows us why we love poetry: it tries to tell us the truth and because the truth is often painful it sometimes makes us laugh. I can't wait to stand on a chair, wave this book in my hand and shout: 'Read this book, citizens, read this book!'"
--Thomas Lux
More raves for Charles Harper Webb!
"Unscrew the locks from the doors!/ Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Walt Whitman declared, and Charles Webb has come bursting through with great vitality and energy, with his sly wit and his dark irony, his funny bone and his rage, his rock-and-roll sensibility and his American gift for gab, his skepticism and his faith, his cunning art. It is a joy to have this life's work gathered together." --Edward Hirsch
And even more!
"Hurray for Shadow Ball! Now the best of Charles Harper Webb's brilliant and funny poems ae packed into one book. And the new ones are just as good. Here is a major poet of the twenty-first century who makes us laugh but also gulp uneasily at his spooky knowledge of human nature." --Maura Stanton
