John Wilkinson (poet)

John Wilkinson is a contemporary English poet, born in 1953. From 1972 to 1975, he studied English at Jesus College, Cambridge, United Kingdom, where he founded, with Charlie Bulbeck and Charles Lambert, the Blue Room, a society devoted to the propagation of poetry and the other fine arts. His first publication, Of Western Limit, (in collaboration with Charles Lambert) appeared in 1974, the year in which Wilkinson won the Chancellor's Medal for Poetry. He has published six major collections of verse as well as critical articles on British and American poetry. His most recent collections are Lake Shore Drive (2006) Contrivances (2003) and Effigies against the Light (2001); a chapbook titled Iphigenia appeared in 2004, and his 1986 collection, Proud Flesh, was re-issued in 2005 with an introduction by Drew Milne. In 1992, his work Hid Lip appeared alongside works by Stephen Rodefer and Rod Mengham in a volume called Writing Out of Character, published by Street Editions. John Wilkinson has held a Frank Knox Fellowship at Harvard University, and was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in 2003/04 at the Nathan S. Kline Institute.

He is now a Poet in Residence at the University of Notre Dame, where he runs a workshop with graduate students in the MFA program.