Somebody said, "What's that?"
As the first two-by-four started to pull away,
and we made clever remarks. Then the air
opened below us, a frieze of people and liquids
clustered for a moment in the stop-time
of astonishment, a constellation of writers
falling slowly through the air.
(Excerpt from Falling From Bill's Party, Anthony Libby, 5/5/96)
A native Floridian, poet, English professor, and literary critic Anthony Libby was born in Jacksonville to James Libby, an engineer, and Gertrude Libby, a housewife.
In 1963, he received a bachelor's degree from College of the Holy Cross and was awarded a yearlong Woodrow Wilson Fellowship; two years later, he was awarded another, which ended in 1967 and overlapped with his pursuit of a doctoral degree from Stanford University. That same year, Libby took a job as assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University in Columbus.
During his post-graduate studies, Libby married Marison Vlastos. They had two children, but divorced in 1976 after eleven years of marriage.
In 1969 - after teaching for two years in Ohio -- Libby received his Ph.D. from Stanford. Five years later, he was promoted to associate professor of English at Ohio State and, in 1985, the same university made him a professor. Libby still teaches at Ohio State today.
Anthony Libby has written three books: 1984's Mythologies of Nothing, Mystical Death in American Poetry, 1940-1970; 1994's Songs to Make the Dust Dance: the Ryojin hisho of Twelfth Century Japan -- a collaboration of poetry translations with Yung-Hee Kim; and 1995's The Secret Turning of the Earth. He has also published more than twenty-five poems and has contributed articles and critical reviews to numerous professional journals, including The New York Times Book Review, American Literature, The Iowa Review, and The Ohio Journal.
"My writing," says Libby of his critical reviews, "is a direct outgrowth of my teaching, which is really my primary activity."
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