Robert Gibb was born in the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Origins of Evening, which was a National Poetry Series winner. He has received numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts grants, seven Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, a Best American Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and The Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, among others. He lives on New Homestead Hill above the Monongahela River.
Mr. Gibb is also a Sandeen prizewinner. The Sandeen prize is a prize from the University of Notre Dame honoring Ernest Sandeen, in which the Notre Dame Press publishes the winner's manuscript and invites them to do a public reading on campus. To be eligible, a poet must have already published at least one book of poems.
ERNEST SANDEEN was a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame from 1946 until his retirement in 1978. He was an award-winning teacher. His poems appeared in such journals as the Hudson Review, Poetry and The New Yorker. He published six volumes of poetry in his lifetime and served as emeritus professor of English at the University of Notre Dame until his death in 1997. His Collected Poems 1953 – 1994 was published in 2001.
The reading is free and open to the public.