Robert Gibb was born in the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of five previous books of poetry: The Origins of Evening (1998), which was a National Poetry Series winner (selected by Eavan Boland); Late Snow (1993); Momentary Days (1989); The Winter House (1984); and The Names of the Earth in Summer (1983). His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts grant, four Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, a Pushcart Prize, the Wildwood Poetry Prize, and the Devil’s Millhopper Chapbook Prize. He currently lives on New Homestead Hill above the Monongahela River.

About The Burning World:

"A redeeming lyricism informs this scrupulously crafted, fiercely elegiac collection. Not since Philip Levine have we had a working-class stiff write such moving poems.”
—Maxine Kumin

"Robert Gibb’s new collection continues the memory work of the burning world he has made a career of building—a world of steel mills and urban displacement, hard labor and its heartbreak. This is the poet’s most personal book, filled with family elegy, formal eloquence, and the embrace of those small, luminous, fire-tested things worth saving. Homestead, not far from Pittsburgh, PA, is, as always, the setting, as if an evolving, working lyric narrative were underway, which there is.”
—Stanley Plumly