Gibbons Ruark

His collections include Rescue the Perishing, Small Rain, Keeping Company, Reeds, A Program for Survival, Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems, Staying Blue, and, most recently, The Road to Ballyvaughan.

He has won numerous awards including three Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland and a Pushcart Prize.

Initially working as a bus boy in at the Lord Jeffrey Inn, he eventually earned a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts.

Having begun to publish poems in the mid-1960s, Ruark was hired at the University of Delaware in 1968 to replace the poet Robert Huff who had departed the previous year.

The influence of Ireland can be seen in much of Ruark's poetry in the late 1980s and Irish subject matter is especially prevalent in many of the poems in his 1991 Rescue the Perishing.

Ruark retired from the University of Delaware in 2006, returning to Raleigh, North Carolina where he currently lives with his wife Kay.