About

jack@ridl.com

Jack Ridl’s collection, Broken Symmetry, was published in 2006 by Wayne State University Press and was selected by the Society of Midland Authors as the best book of poetry for 2006, an honor shared with poet Jeff Worley. Ridl is the author of two other full-length collections, and three chapbooks, including Outside the Center Ring from Puddinghouse Publications, a collection of circus poems published in 2006, and Against Elegies, which was selected by Sharon Dolin and former Poet Laureate Billy Collins for the 2001 Chapbook Award from The Center for Book Arts in New York.

Ridl, who has taught at Hope College for more than 37 years and who with his wife, Julie, founded the college’s Visiting Writers Series, is co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Poetry: Perspectives and Responses, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, and co-editor, with Peter Schakel, of both 250 Poems and Literature: A Portable Anthology, also from Beford/St. Martin’s. Their Approaching Literature in the 21st Century was published by Bedford/St.Martin’s in 2005.

In 1996, The Carnegie Foundation named Ridl “Michigan Professor of the Year.” He was chosen by the Hope College students for the “HOPE Award” given to “Hope’s Outstanding Professor Educator,” was selected the student body’s “Favorite Professor” in 2003, and has twice been asked by the students to give the college’s commencement address.

In the past 15 years, more than 50 of Ridl’s former students have gone on to MFA programs and have published their work nationally.

Ridl grew up in both the world of basketball where his father was a well-known head coach at Westminster College and the University of Pittsburgh, and the world of the circus, inherited from his mother’s family.

Of his poems, Naomi Shihab Nye has written, “Jack Ridl writes with complete generosity and full-hearted wisdom and care. His deeply intelligent, funny, and gracious poems befriend a reader so completely and warmly, we might all have the revelation that our lives are rich poems too. What a gift!”

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote: “Against Elegies arises from a sense of curiosity about life in both its plain and puzzling aspects. These poems feel their way forward and are attentive enough to the reader to make us feel included–happy accomplices to his search.”

Richard Jones wrote, “A sweet intelligence and compassionate eye are the hallmark of these wise poems–just the sort of art we need in these dark and unenlightened times.”

Conrad Hilberry has written “one group of poems is unmatched, I believe, anywhere in American poetry. I mean the sports poems. They are so compelling, so varied, so familiar to anyone who knows high school and sports that they may well introduce a new genre.”

And Bob Hicok wrote of Broken Symmetry, “Ridl reinvigorates the familiar through his fidelity to the people and the objects in his life. This is a full and lasting collection.”

Ridl’s speaking calendar, publications list and ordering information are kept up-to-date at www.ridl.com.

Ridl lives along a creek that winds into Lake Michigan with his wife, Julie, two dogs and two cats. His daughter is the artist, Meridith Ridl.