C. S. Giscombe was born in Dayton, Ohio. He was educated in the Dayton public and parochial schools and earned degrees in English from the State University of New York at Albany and Cornell University. His poetry books are Prairie Style, Two Sections from Practical Geography, Giscome Road, Here, At Large, and Postcards; his prose book--about Canada--is Into and Out of Dislocation.Giscombe is the 2010 recipient of the Stephen Henderson Award in Poetry (given by the African American Literature and Culture Society). Prairie Style was awarded a 2008 American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation; Giscome Road won the 1998 Carl Sandburg Prize, given by the Chicago Public Library. C. S. Giscombe's writing has also won him fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the Canadian Embassy. He has worked as a taxi driver, as a hospital orderly, as a railroad brakeman, and for years edited a national literary magazine (Epoch, at Cornell University). His writing has appeared in several anthologies--the Best American Poetry series, the Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, Bluesprint: Black British Columbia Literature and Orature, Lyrical Postmodernisms, American Hybrid, etc. He is a long-distance cyclist. He teaches poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.=============================================Electronic Poetry Center page: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/giscombe/Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._GiscombeInterview (with Mark Nowak) at Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/08/prairie-style-an-interview-with-cs-giscombe/