Angel, Ralph 1951-

PERSONAL:

Born 1951, in Seattle, WA. Education: University of Washington, B.A.; University of California, Irvine, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Los Angeles, CA. Office—Department of English, University of Redlands, 1200 E. Colton Ave., P.O. Box 3080, Redlands, CA 92373-0999. E-mail—ralph_angel@redlands.edu.

CAREER:

University of Redlands, Redlands, CA, Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English; Vermont College, Montpelier, MFA Program in Writing, faculty member.

AWARDS, HONORS:

James Laughlin Award, Academy of American Poets, 1995, for Neither World; Pushcart Prize; Fulbright Foundation fellow; Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, 2003, for Poema del Cante Jondo; Bess Hokin Award, Modern Poetry Association; Poetry magazine award.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Anxious Latitudes, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1986.

Neither World, Miami University Press (Oxford, OH), 1995.

Twice Removed, Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY), 2001.

Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems, 1986-2006, Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY), 2006.

(Translator) Federico García Lorca, Poema del Cante Jondo (title means "Poem of the Deep Song"), Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY), 2006.

Contributor to books, including New American Poets of the 90s, Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature, and The Best American Poetry. Contributor to periodicals, including American Poetry Review, New Yorker, Antioch Review, and Poetry.

SIDELIGHTS:

Poet Ralph Angel grew up, lives, and works on the U.S. West Coast, yet has traveled throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Angel is on faculty on both coasts, teaching creative writing classes. As a poet, Angel has won numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright fellowship.

The first book of poetry Angel published was Anxious Latitudes in 1986. Angel did not publish another book for almost ten years, when he released Neither World. The "world" Angel introduces here is that of Los Angeles through surrealism. Gail Wronsky, writing in the Antioch Review, wrote that Neither World "is an exhilarating, heartbreaking, deliciously subversive place."

Once again displaying a strong sense of place with Los Angeles, Twice Removed is a compact collection of poems at merely forty-nine pages. Writing in Jacket, Ethan Paquin admitted that readers will "encounter some harrowing landscapes" while reading the poems. Paquin was initially hesitant about the book's small size, but admitted that Angel "just might tell us more about frailty and displacement and the utter magicality of existence … than some of his peers' tomes … ever could."

Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems, 1986-2006, published in 2006, is a collection of Angel's previous three collections, plus twenty-three new poems. Fred Muratori, writing in Library Journal, called Angel "a poet of the interior," adding that he "conjures a half-lit, Prufrockian world forever caught between states of dreaming and waking" in his poetry.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, summer, 1996, Gail Wronsky, review of Neither World, p. 376.

Jacket, October, 2002, Ethan Paquin, review of Twice Removed.

Library Journal, September 15, 2006, Fred Muratori, review of Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems, 1986-2006, p. 63.

Poetry, February, 2003, David Baker, "Heaven and Earth," p. 285; spring, 2005, author feature.

ONLINE

Green Integer,http://www.greeninteger.com/ (March 19, 2007), author profile.

Poets.org,http://www.poets.org/ (March 19, 2007), author profile.

Sarabande Books Web site,http://www.sarabandebooks.org/ (May 16, 2002), author interview.

University of Redlands Web site,http://www.redlands.edu/ (March 19, 2007), author profile.