Early Years

Rigsbee was born in Durham, North Carolina to Earl and Geneva. Earl Rigsbee of Chapel Hill was an aspiring jazz musician. He played the sax, trumpet and piano. After WWII, he worked as a machinist for Liggett & Myers Tobacco (Liggett Group) Company of Durham, NC. Geneva Odom came from a large farming family in Mount Olive, but later moved to Durham to care for her aunt. While in Durham, she married Earl and was also employed by the cigarette factory. Geneva later worked as a secretary for Durham High School (now Durham School of the Arts). David Rigsbee graduated from Durham High School in 1967. While attending high school, he was involved in student government, athletics and dramatic activities. He also studied Russian for two years and wrote poetry. Rigsbee received the Morehead Scholarship (now referred to as the Morehead-Cain Scholarship) his senior year, which secured him a place the following year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His younger brother, Stephen Rigsbee, committed suicide in 1992.

Career

David Rigsbee attended UNC-Chapel Hill 1967-1971 and graduated with a BA (“with Highest Honors”) in English and Russian. While attending college at UNC-Chapel Hill, he attended an honors class taught by Louis Rubin and studied with feminist poet, Carolyn Kizer. In addition to English and poetry, Rigsbee took classes in Russian during the summer and translated poems by Joseph Brodsky, who he discovered in a Russian magazine, for his senior thesis. He also won the UNC Student Chapbook prize. Rigsbee married Elizabeth Muller (Betsy), whom he met while attending UNC, and continued on to graduate school. He graduated from Johns Hopkins a year later (1972) with an MA in Creative Writing. Rigsbee met Brodsky at a reading in New York and a friendship ensued. In 1972, he began his first full-time teaching job at Hamilton. Rigsbee and Betsy divorced at the end of the year. In 1976, he applied and was accepted as a writing fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, moving to Massachusetts for the year with his companion, Doris Francine Low. His books, Stamping Ground (1976) and The Ardis Anthology of New American Poetry (1977) were published by Ardis. Hired by UNC-Greensboro, he and Doris moved to North Carolina and married two years later.

In 1982, Rigsbee moved to Louisiana. While teaching at LSU, he received the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry (1984) followed by the Pound Prize in Experimental Poetry (1985). Rigsbee and Doris divorced at this time. He moved back to North Carolina in 1987 and taught at St. Andrews Presbyterian College, where he worked as Director of St. Andrews Press and poetry editor of the St. Andrews Review. The Hopper Light was published a year later by L’Epervier Press.

Over the following eight years, Rigsbee taught at Virginia Tech, University of Virginia, and Hamilton College. While working at Virginia Tech, he received a M.A.L.S. in philosophy from Hollins College (1991). He also published An Answering Music: On the Poetry of Carolyn Kizer (Ford-Brown & Co., 1990) and Your Heart Will Fly Away (The Smith, 1992) and won the American Academy of Poets Prize at UVA in1992). While teaching a second time at Hamilton, in 1995, Rigsbee received his Ph. D. in English from the University of Virginia and won the Griffith Award for Best Graduate Essay. His dissertation, entitled Styles of Ruin: Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy, was published later by Greenwood Press (1999).

After receiving his Ph.D., Rigsbee met the painter Jill Bullitt. They married in 1995 and moved to Mount Olive, North Carolina, where he began teaching at Mount Olive College. He has since published several award winning books, including Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry (University of Virginia Press, 2001), recognized by the American Library Association as a notable university press book of 2001.

Awards

• 2010 Sam Ragan Awards winner.

Forthcoming

• The Pilot House (poems) Black Lawrence Press, December 2010
• School of the Americas (poems) Black Lawrence Press, December 2012

Books

• Two Estates (poems) Cherry Grove Collections, 2009
• Cloud Journal (poems) Turning Point Books, 2008
• The Dissolving Island (poems) BkMk Press, University of Missouri at Kansas City, 2003
• Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry University of Virginia Press, 2001
• Styles of Ruin: Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy (criticism) Greenwood Press, 1999
• A Skeptic's Notebook: Longer Poems St. Andrews Press, 1997
• Trailers (prose) The University of Virginia Press, 1996
• Your Heart Will Fly Away (poems) The Smith, 1992
• An Answering Music: On the Poetry of Carolyn Kizer (criticism) Ford-Brown & Co., 1990
• The Hopper Light (poems) L'Epervier Press, 1988
• The Ardis Anthology of New American Poetry Ardis, 1977
• Stamping Ground (poems) Ardis Publishers, 1976

Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Miscellaneous

• Seen From Above, catalogue, Philip Govedare (painter), Francine Cedars Gallery, Seattle, 2008
• "David Rigsbee Reading at AWP," 2008 (The Cortland Review: YouTube)
• Sonnets to Hamlet Pudding House, 2004
• Greatest Hits: 1975 - 2000 Pudding House, 2001
• Scenes on an Obelisk Pudding House, 2000
• To Be Here Coraddi Chapbook, 1980
• "Only Heaven," Willow Springs Broadsheet, 1993
• “Crickets,” Georgia Review broadside, 1985
• Poetry-in-Motion #7, Nobodaddy Press, 1977

Translations

Collected Poems in English. 2000 by Joseph Brodsky (poems translated with others), edited by Ann Kjellberg, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000A Part of Speech by Joseph Brodsky, Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1980Poems of Mikhail Lermontov in Russian Romanticism Ardis, 1984