About

Jack Ridl, Poet Laureate of Douglas, Michigan (Population 1,100), is the author of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press).  Jack’s Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (WSUPress, 2013) was awarded the National Gold Medal for poetry by ForeWord Reviews. His collection Broken Symmetry (WSUPress) was co-recipient of The Society of Midland Authors best book of poetry award for 2006. His Losing Season (CavanKerry Press) was named the best sports book of the year for 2009 by The Institute for International Sport, and The Boston Globe named it one of the five best books about sports. In 2017 it was developed into a Readers Theater work. A new collection, All at Once, will be released by CavanKerry Press in the autumn of 2024.

Winner of The Gary Gildner Prize for Poetry, Jack has been featured on public radio (“It’s Only a Game with Bill Littlefield,” “The Story with Dick Gordon,” and Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac.”), on the RattleCast with Tim Green, Prose from the Underground with John Mauk, Clifford Ranes’ Poetry Passages, and The Poetry Society of New Hampshire’s online series with Jimmy Pappas. Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected his Against Elegies chapbook for The Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award, for which he read in New York with Billy Collins and Sharon Dolin at Christmas after 9/11. 

Ridl and Peter Schakel are co-authors of Approaching Poetry and Approaching Literature, and editors of 250 Poems, and Literature, A Portable Anthology, all from Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. With William Olsen he edited Poetry in Michigan in Poetry (New Issues Press). 

He has been invited to read in many venues including the international Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and was one of twelve people in the arts from around the U.S. invited to the Fetzer Institute for their first conference on compassion and forgiveness. In 2014, Jack received the “Talent Award” from the Literacy Society of West Michigan for his “lifetime of work for poetry literacy,” and The Poetry Society of Michigan named him “Honorary Chancellor,” only the second poet so honored. His poem “Remembering the Night I Dreamed Paul Klee Married the Sky” was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye and featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine for November 3, 2019. 

Following the presidential election in 2016 he started the “In Time Project,” each Thursday sending out a commentary and poem. Christian Zaschke, the NYC-based U.S. correspondent for the leading German Newspaper Sueddeutsche  Zeitung, wrote a feature about his work. Jack has appeared on many podcasts, YouTube programs, and his poem concerning the Orchard Park school shootings featured on Rattle Magazine’s Poets Respond was the most read and watched as well as the most shared poem from that site in 2021. 

Jack and his wife Julie founded the visiting writers series at Hope College where he taught for 37 years. The students named him both their Outstanding Professor and Favorite Professor, and in 1996 The Carnegie (CASE) Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. Nine of his students are included in the anthology Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25 edited by Naomi Shihab Nye. More than 90 of Jack’s students have earned an MFA degree and more than 100 are published authors, several of whom have received First Book Awards and national honors. 

Jack gives a video reading as The Sentimentalist,  on YouTube each Thursday morning. His website is http://www.ridl.com

Mary Ruefle writes, “If you don’t believe you have a soul, reading this book will give you one — its soulfulness is that far-reaching, generous, persuasive, and real.”

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!” and “Jack Ridl is a superstar in the realm of compassionate, transporting, life-changing poetry.”

Li-Young Lee writes, “What a gift it is to have this impressive collection from Jack Ridl. Reading his poetry is like hearing from a neighbor who has lived his entire life with the most profound attention and care. And while that attention often enough reveals the blessings that surround him, and while he himself seems always ready and willing to bless the world in turn, Ridl walks a tightrope in his work. A degree one way or the other, and he uncovers heaven on earth or a quiet hell. It’s amazing to me how he can hold both realms so intimately together in one vision, frequently in the same poem. And he makes it all seem easy, his language moving subtly between the various modes of conversation, prayer, spiritual hunger, comedy, nostalgia, grief, and celebration. I truly hope we can evolve toward the quality of being these poems reveal.”

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

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

Ridl lives a short walk from Douglas Beach, arguably the most beautiful of Lake Michigan’s disappearing public beaches, with his wife, the writer and artist Julie Ridl, and a few barely domesticated beasts. His daughter is the artist, Meridith Ridl.

Author photo for download