Born in Philadelphia in 1968, Gregory Pardlo is a graduate of Rutgers University-Camden. As an undergraduate, he managed the small jazz club his grandfather owned in nearby Pennsauken, NJ. He received the MFA from NYU as a New York Times Fellow in Poetry in 2001 and the MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University in 2016. Pardlo is the author of Totem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Review / Honickman Prize, and translator of Niels Lyngsoe’s, Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace (Bookthug, 2004). His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and two editions of Best American Poetry, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a fellowship for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received other fellowships from the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Lotos Club Foundation and Cave Canem. Currently a Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University, he is Poetry Editor for Virginia Quarterly Review and is a Visiting Associate Professor of Practice at NYU Abu Dhabi. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His forthcoming poetry collection is Spectral Evidence, scheduled for January, 2024.