C. S. Giscombe
C. S. Giscombe (born 1950 Dayton, Ohio) is an African-American poet, essayist, and professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. Life A graduate of SUNY at Albany and Cornell University where he earned degrees, he was editor of Epoch magazine in the 1970s and 1980s. He has taught at Cornell University, Syracuse University, Illinois State University, and Pennsylvania State University. As of 2015, he teaches at University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in Callaloo, Chicago Review, Hambone, Iowa Review, Boundary 2, etc.. Giscombe’s honors and awards include the Stephen Henderson Award in Poetry, the American Book Award, and the Carl Sandburg Prize. As well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the Canadian Embassy. There have been a plethora of acknowledgments throughout Giscombe's career. Giscombe has also worked as a taxi driver, a hospital orderly, and a railroad brakeman. He acknowledges his childhood fascination with trains as having an influence in his writing, noting that the railroad is "not sentimental...continuous...intimately connected to features of land and water." Awards 1998 Carl Sandburg Award for Giscome Road. 2008 American Book Award for Prairie Style