Robert Samuel "Sam" Gwynn (born 1948, Eden, North Carolina) is an American poet and anthologist associated with New Formalism.
[6] Gwynn's first full-length book, The Drive-in, won the Breakthrough Award of the University of Missouri Press in 1986.
[7] He has received the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse of the American Academy of Arts and Letters,[8] served as an original faculty member of the West Chester University Conference on Form and Narrative in Poetry, and was included in the first significant anthology of New Formalism, Rebel Angels: Twenty-five Poets of the New Formalism (Story Line Press 1995).
[11] In September, 2015, he was appointed Program Director of the West Chester University Poetry Conference.
No American poet of his generation has written better sonnets, and very few can equal him in the ballade, couplet, rondeau, or pantoum–not to mention the half dozen new forms he has invented"; further, according to Gioia, "Gwynn juxtaposes styles and subjects not customarily seen together–mythic and modish images phrased in language alternatively sublime and debased–but told with such force of imagination and assured musicality that the resulting poems seem not idiosyncratic but inevitable.