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Cecil S. Giscombe

Born: Dayton, Ohio
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: N/A

Biography: Professor Giscombe 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.


Awards:
  • 1998 Carl Sandburg Award 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;

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Email: csgiscombe@berkeley.edu
Cecil S. Giscombe on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=cecil+s.+giscombe


Selected Titles

  EVELINA :
ISBN: 1504045815 OCLC: 987713321

OPEN ROAD MEDIA, [Place of publication not identified] : 2017.

This precursor to the works of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth takes a witty look at romance and womanhood in eighteenth-century high society. Denied by her aristocratic libertine father and raised by a clergyman in the English countryside, Evelina Anville is a stranger to fashionable London society. But with the arrival of her eighteenth year comes the time for her formal debut, whether or not she'or London'is ready. Through a series of societal faux pas, Evelina learns about the complexities of society and attracts the eyes of dashing and distinguished bachelors. Still, landing a man in the city won't be easy ... 'his epistolary novel was the first by satirist Fanny Burney, acclaimed for her talent for comic fiction as well as her diaries chronicling eighteenth-century life among the aristocracy, in particular the struggles of women.

Giscome Road /
ISBN: 1564781844 OCLC: 38096973

Dalkey Archive Press, Normal, IL : 1998.

"Concerned with specific locales in northern Canada named for the 19th-century Jamaican miner and explorer John Robert Giscome, the volume incorporates a variety of historical documents, maps, and dreams, to go "in & further in," discovering and documenting music, racial dichotomies, sexuality, and the ways in which landscape itself is described."--BOOK JACKET.

Here /
ISBN: 1564783383 OCLC: 30036171

Into and out of dislocation /
ISBN: 0865475415 OCLC: 42690036

North Point Press, New York : 2000.

"It was on his third or fourth trip there that the poet C. S. Giscombe grew aware of the space Canada had staked out in his imagination. Giscombe later spent a winter with his family in British Columbia, and his time there becomes a lens through which he interrogates his preoccupation with Canada's otherness. He writes that "border crossings are always sexy. And racial." And so this book is filled with both actual and metaphoric exploration - and Giscombe's travels serve as points of departure for a series of meditations on racial, national, physical, and psychological borders." "At the heart of this book is the author's ambivalent pursuit of John Robert Giscome, a man who may or may not be a relative. John R., as Giscombe calls him, was a black Jamaican explorer who flourished in British Columbia during the last half of the nineteenth century. Giscombe documents the places that John R. passed through, and he uncovers stories about mining, pioneer life, and even cannibalism. Giscombe likes to imagine John R. as "a self-aware outsider" and that status comes to seem more important - more interesting - than any historical truth."--BOOK JACKET.

 

 

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