Background
Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida.
Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida.
Nathaniel obtained his B.A. from Princeton University and his PhD from Stanford University.
Nathaniel is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Mackey is currently teaching a poetry workshop at Duke University.
Nathaniel has been editor and publisher of Hambone since 1982 and he won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006. He taught and lived in Santa Cruz from 1979 to 2010.
Mackey has published four volumes of an ongoing prose project entitled, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Bass Cathedral, Atet A. D., Djbot Baghostus's Run and Bedouin Hornbook.
Mackey is the author of Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing, an influential book of literary theory, and more recently of Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews. He has edited the avant-garde literary journal Hambone for more than 15 years, and co-edited Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose with Art Lange.
Quotes from others about the person
...Mackey's series of improvisatory jazz-inspired fictions locates a ground between invention and listening that he defines as the source of culture itself. All culture, for Mackey, is a form of listening to what "we" are collectively improvising.
In 1990, Nathaniel married Pascale Gaitet, and they have a daughter and one stepson.