UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 21, Page 3
February 25, 1993
Gibbons Ruark is recipient of third NEA poetry fellowship

     Gibbons Ruark, professor of English at the University of Delaware
since l969, has received a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment
for the Arts, his third such award since 1979.
     National Endowment Poetry Fellowships are awarded to "individual
artists of exceptional talent to provide them with an opportunity to
further their professional careers in the arts."
     Ruark has published five collections of poetry.
     His latest, Rescue the Perishing, published by Louisiana State
University in l991, has been called a "dazzling volume."
     One reviewer said he "is capable of a music as engaging as the
strongest blues or jazz. A few lines into a silent reading of 'Postscript
To An Elegy,' many readers will be tempted to whisper the words.
     Well before the final stanza, most will have surrendered themselves to
the delight of hearing the words aloud."
     Ruark's other volumes include A Program for Survival, Reeds, Keeping
Company and Small Rain.
     He is a native of Raleigh, N.C., and earned his bachelor's degree from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963 and a master's
degree in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1965.
     His poems have been published nationally in The New Yorker, Poetry
Northwest, The New Republic, American Poetry Review and Harvard Magazine.