Blue Fasa

Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida in 1947. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, and has received many awards for his work, including the National Book Award in poetry for Splay Anthem, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, and the Bollingen Prize from the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Mackey is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University, and edits the literary journal Hambone.

"Nathaniel Mackey's poetry ambitiously continues an American bardic line that unfolds from Leaves of Grass to Pound's Cantos to H.D.'s Trilogy to Olson's The Maximus Poems, winds through the whole of Robert Duncan's work, and extends beyond all of these. Mackey's words go where music goes: a brilliant and major accomplishment."