Author Profiles

George Bilgere’s eighth collection of poetry is Central Air (2022). He has received the Midland Authors Prize, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the May Swenson Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress, the Devins Award, the University of Akron Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Ohioana Poetry Prize, the Autumn House Poetry Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize, a Cleveland Creative Workforce grant, and four Individual Excellence grants from the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, New Ohio Review, Hopkins Quarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. In 2021 he was the winner of the New Ohio Review’s Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize.

 Bilgere has given poetry readings at the Library of Congress, the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC., the Chautauqua Institute, the Philip Larkin Library in Hull, England, and colleges, bookstores and libraries around the country. NPR listeners know him from his appearances on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion and more than fifty appearances on the National Public Radio broadcast, The Writer’s Almanac. 

 Here in Cleveland, Bilgere, a recipient of John Carroll’s Distinguished Faculty Award, hosts a popular spoken word radio show on WJCU called Wordplay. Bilgere lives in Cleveland Heights with his marvelous wife and two very fine little boys. They spend their summers in Berlin, Germany, and can tell you a great deal about beer gardens.