Jerry Bradley

Jerry W. Bradley is an American poet and university professor.

Jerry Bradley was born in Jacksboro, Texas, in 1948, the son of Carmon Jackson Bradley, a career U.S. Army veteran, and Beatrice Zella Hale Bradley. He spent his early youth in various military towns, including Munich and Frankfort, Germany, and Camp Bullis near San Antonio, where his father was range commander. He then moved with his parents and two older siblings to Mineral Wells, Texas, following his father's retirement in 1956.

Bradley graduated from Mineral Wells High School in 1965 and attended Midwestern University (now Midwestern State University) in Wichita Falls as a member of the Honors Program, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1969. At Midwestern he was student body president (1968–69) editor of the student newspaper, The Wichitan, (1967–68), and a prize-winning intercollegiate debater inducted in 1967 into Pi Kappa Delta, the national forensics honor society. After graduation from Midwestern, Bradley enrolled in the graduate English program at Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth, where he earned his M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1975.

After receiving his Ph.D., Bradley became an assistant professor at Boston University. In 1976 he was recruited by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech) in Socorro, where he became chair of the Department of Humanities in 1984. At New Mexico Tech, with Professor John Rothfork, he founded New Mexico Humanities Review in 1978 and continued as editor for the next seventeen years until 1993. While in New Mexico, Bradley also published his first volume of poetry, Simple Versions of Disaster, which received critical praise in numerous reviews (see Reviews below). Bradley is listed in the Handbook of Texas Online among poets who have “written verse attempting to come to grips with the specific local facts of Texas culture and history.”

In 1993 Bradley became Dean of Humanities at Indiana University Southeast. While in Indiana he wrote The Movement: British Poets of the 1950s, a critical study of nine English writers: Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, D. J. Enright, Robert Conquest, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, and John Holloway. He has also published academic papers on Wallace Stevens,William Wordsworth,Samuel BeckettEdgar Allan Poe, Philip Larkin,Alan Sillitoe,David Wagoner, and others.

...
Wikipedia