White Museum

George Bilgere has published six collections of poetry, including Imperial (2014); The White Museum (2010), which was awarded the Autumn House Poetry Prize; Haywire (2006), which won the May Swenson Poetry Award; and The Good Kiss (2002), which was selected by Billy Collins to win the University of Akron Poetry Award. He has won numerous awards, including the Midland Authors Award and a Pushcart Prize. Bilgere has received grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, and the Ohio Arts Council. A resident of Ohio, Bilgere lives in Cleveland, where he teaches creative writing at John Carroll University.

"Once again, George Bilgere has shown that imaginative wonders and deep emotional truths can be achieved with plain, colloquial American speech." —Billy Collins "Bilgere’s impact sneaks up on you. Like his cold living room, his syntax and diction are everyday, but he uses that to his strength, carefully gaining your trust before pushing you off the cliff. His style, combined with deft handling of the line, sets booby traps of meaning for the reader." —Gadfly Online "The funny thing about The White Museum is that it keeps on being funny while being perfectly clear-eyed about the cargo of unrealistic expectations. The other thing is that George Bilgere is an absolute whiz at the twists and turns of the glorious American language, the flexible American syntax, as spoken by everybody up and down the great chain of Americanness in our bewitched century. Oh what a pleasure to watch him spin those sentences." —Alicia Ostriker