Scott Hightower

[1] At the University of Texas at Austin, Hightower studied classical civilization, literature, and performance, earning his BA in communications in 1973.

The poems range widely in style and subject: soliloquies, laments, eccentric ponderings, and contemplations of the physical and the sublime.

In Tin Can Tourist, Hightower’s first book, the poems covers the plains of Texas to the streets of the Bronx; from the bedroom to the Spanish Steps of Rome and the Chora Church of Istanbul and back.

Of the book, poet Marie Ponsot wrote, "The most exciting quality of Hightower’s work is its poetic and paradoxical unifying of emotional and intellectual depth with a marvelous quietness.

McClatchy wrote: "Scott Hightower has Marianne Moore’s scissors and Elizabeth Bishop’s spectacles and he has written a book in the spirit of their adventurous precisions.

"[7] Hightower’s third book, Part of the Bargain, received the 2004 Copper Canyon Press Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets.

He reminds us that poetry by definition "seeks a foundation of the commonwealth in the truth of the individual, guaranteed and restored through the integrity of Language."