Joe Milford Hosts Gabriel Gudding

Gudding was born in a Norwegian-American part of northwestern Minnesota. He spent his formative years in Moorhead, Minnesota and Fargo, North Dakota. At fifteen, Gudding moved with his family briefly to Iowa before settling in Washington state. Gudding attended The Evergreen State College, an experimental school in Olympia, Washington, Purdue University and Cornell University. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois where he was hired to teach about "experimental" poetry writing and poetics. Gudding practices vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin (as taught by S. N. Goenka). A recipient of The Nation Discovery Award, Gudding received the 2001 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Pitt Poetry Series, edited by Ed Ochester for his first book A Defense of Poetry. Gudding's second book of poetry, Rhode Island Notebook, was published in November 2007 by Dalkey Archive Press. Rhode Island Notebook is a four hundred thirty-six page poem interlarded with essays and the ubiquitous flotsam of quotidian awareness. It was written in Gudding's car on the highways between Normal, Illinois, and Providence, Rhode Island, during twenty-six roundtrip journeys, and has been called by the polymathic writer and artist Alan Sondheim, "the first 21st Century classic."