During forty years of college teaching, he served as Wyndham Robertson Visiting Writer in Residence in the Master of Arts program at Hollins University, Coal Royalty Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Whichard chair in the Humanities at East Carolina University.
His translation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis appeared in the Penn Greek Drama Series in 1998. Galvin is a poet who has published much but not too much. That is, many of the poems here are as fresh and powerful as the poems in such strong earlier collections as Atlantic Flyway, Seals in the Inner Harbor, and Winter Oysters.
While Galvin continues to work the same material, he manages to make it new.
His narrative poem Hotel Malabar, winner of the 1997 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 1998). His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Education Association fellowships, the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation (England), and Poetry’s Levinson Prize, the OB Hardison, Junior. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum.
