Gillian Conoley

Gillian Conoley (born 1955) is an American poet, the author of seven collections of poetry. Her work has been anthologized widely, most recently in Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricisms, Mondadori’s Nuova Poesia Americana (Italian), and Best American Poetry. Conoley's poetry has appeared in Conjunctions, New American Writing, American Poetry Review, The Canary, A Public Space, Carnet de Rouge, Jacket, Or, Fence, Verse, Ironwood, jubilat, Zyzzyva, Ploughshares, the Denver Quarterly, the Missouri Review and other publications. A recipient of the Jerome J. Seshtack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, as well as several Pushcart Prizes, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt. She has taught as a Visiting Poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, the University of Denver, Vermont College, Texas State University, and Tulane University.

Conoley's work is difficult to classify into any discrete poetic category. Haunted by narrative, linguistically alive, the work is inventive and exploratory, certainly influenced by such movements as Language Poetry and the French Symbolists, Conoley's poems are often meditations on culture which may contain multiple dictions and narrative directions. Language itself seems to be of particular interest. Barbara Guest has said of her work, "The poems of Gillian Conoley lead us up to then step just out of sight where an ordinary sign begins. They beckon us from where an invisible power distorts; a sudden view appears of innocence aslant."

Born in 1955 in Austin, Texas, Conoley grew up in Taylor, a nearby farming community. Conoley holds a BA in Journalism from Southern Methodist University and an MFA from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her earlier work (Some Gangster Pain, Tall Stranger) contained more straightforward narratives and was resonant with the desperado atmospherics of Conoley's native state. The next four books became more and more linguistically inventive, without ever entirely abandoning narrative.

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