Ralph Salisbury
poet/professor/fiction writer

Ralph Salisbury, Professor Emeritus of the University of Oregon, is the author of ten books of poetry and three books of short fiction. His poetry titles include Light From a Bullet Hole: Poems New and Selected; Blind Pumper at the Well; War in the Genes; Rainbows of Stone; A White Rainbow; Going to the Water: Poems of a Cherokee Heritage; Spirit Beast Chant; Pointing at the Rainbow; Ghost Grapefruit and Other Poems; and Poesie Da Un Retaggio Cherokee (Multimedia Edizioni, Salerno, Italy). His short fiction titles include The Indian Who Bombed Berlin; The Last Rattlesnake Throw; and One Indian and Two Chiefs.

He has received many awards, among them a Rockefeller Foundation Residency at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy; the Chapelbrook Award; the Northwest Poetry Award; three Fulbright professorships, to Germany and Norway; and an Amparts (USIS) lectureship in India. Spirit Beast Chant (Blue Cloud Press) has been reprinted in English, in Bombay, by the U.S. Cultural Affairs Agency, then translated into Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. In selecting Rainbows of Stone, as an Oregon Book Award finalist, judge Maxine Kumin wrote, ‘Nature in Ralph Salisbury's conception is a Presence to be addressed. I was drawn especially to such poems as "Oil Spill Spreading," "Family Task, 4th Year," and "This Is My Death Dream." This is a poet dedicated to keeping his heritage alive. His book deserves a broad audience.’

Born of a Cherokee story-teller, singer father and a story-telling Irish American mother, Ralph Salisbury grew up hunting and trapping, for meat and pelts, and working on a family farm, which had no electricity or running water but was reachable by a dirt road. When he visited his father's mother, the only road was a footpath along a creek. Through World War Two service, he earned six years of university education, and has worked at writing, editing, translating and teaching writing and literature from 1950 to the present. He has continuously published poems and fiction - in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Norway, France and India - since his twenty-first year.

His first publication based on his family’s Native American realities was “In the Children’s Museum in Nashville,” a poem published by the New Yorker, years before N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize called attention to the growing Native American movement. Among the many magazines publishing his work are Poetry, Epoch, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Chariton Review, New Letters, Southwest Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and Northwest Review. Some anthologies which include his poems and fiction are: Identity Lessons (Penguin); Song of the Turtle (Ballantyne/​Random House); Red Dawn, Blue Earth (Doubleday); Aniyunwiya/​Real Human Beings (Greenfield Review Press); Earth Song, Sky Spirit (Doubleday); Sur le Dos de la Tortue #4 (Leon, France). Autobiographical essays appear in Returning the Gift (University of Arizona) and Speaking for Ourselves (University of Nebraska Press).

For six years the editor-in-chief of Northwest Review, Salisbury also has edited A Nation Within, an anthology of contemporary Native American writing (Outriggers Press, New Zealand), and has co-translated two books by Sami (Lapp) poet Nils-Aslak Valkeappaa: The Trekways of the Wind (University of Arizona Press) and The Sun My Father (University of Washington Press). He is currently (2009-2010) Guest-Editing a special issue of Yellow Medicine Review.

Besides the University of Oregon, where he has taught since 1960, Ralph Salisbury has taught at Drake University, Texas A & M University, and the University of Frankfurt/​Main (Germany). He has been featured on radio and television, and he has given many readings and workshops for universities, public schools and cultural organizations across the United States and abroad. For praise of his teaching, see “A Writing Fool,’ p 79, Newsweek, November 23, 1999, reprinted in The Readers Digest, August 2000.

The father of three grown children, and the grandfather of four, he lives in Eugene, Oregon, with his wife, poet and writer Ingrid Wendt.

Dedicated, as he says, to the Tribe of the World, Ralph Salisbury comments: “Though I have lived and worked among the intelligentsia of many nations, my writing comes from having lived as a questing, mixed-race, working-class individual in a violent world, and my work is offered to the spirit of human goodness, which unites all people in the eternal struggle against evil, a struggle to prevail against global extinction.”

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