Celebrated poet Eduardo C. Corral will join WashU’s Department of English next fall, adding to the MFA program’s roster of award-winning faculty.
Corral’s debut poetry collection “Slow Lightning” was chosen by Carl Phillips, professor of English, for the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize — making Corral the first Latino poet to win the competition. His second collection, “Guillotine,” was longlisted for the National Book Award. His poems have appeared in Ambit, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
“In Corral’s refusal to think in reductive terms lies his great authority,” Phillips wrote in the foreword to “Slow Lightning.” “Intimacy, humor, outrage, longing, fear — and have I mentioned with no irony whatsoever, the sheer heart of these poems?”
Corral is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship, the National Holmes Poetry Prize, and the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. A CantoMundo Fellow, he has held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing at Colgate University and was the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University.
Corral currently teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. He has degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
He will relocate from Raleigh, North Carolina, to St. Louis this summer and begin at WashU in fall 2024.
“We could not be more excited to welcome such an excellent person and poet to our department,” said Abram Van Engen, chair of English and the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities. “We have a storied, powerful MFA program with a long tradition of nationally recognized writers who draw in the best students. That tradition continues forward in the work of Eduardo C. Corral.”
