We’re excited to announce the inauguration of the Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship. This award, sponsored by Jon’s wife, Allison Joseph, and Jon’s family, honors Jon’s lifetime contribution to poetry and the poetry community through his work as an editor. Likewise, we are delighted to say that Kevin Durkin is the recipient of this first Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship. Kevin, a dedicated editor in both his professional and creative life, is Managing Editor at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, as well as Managing Editor of Light magazine. We’re extremely pleased that Kevin will be joining us at the 2023 Conference, May 23-26.
About Jon Tribble
Jon Tribble began his editing career as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he edited the campus literary journal, Equinox. In graduate school at Indiana University at Bloomington, he worked on the staff of the Indiana Review, including for a year as editor. Jon was one of the founders of Crab Orchard Review, SIU Carbondale’s long-running literary journal, and was the Series Editor of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. He also worked on the acclaimed literary magazine Crazyhorse and was a co-editor of volume 3 in the Glass Lyre Press Aeolian Harp Series.
In addition to being an editor, Jon was a highly regarded poet who published three collections of his own poetry:Natural State (Glass Lyre Press, 2016), And There Is Many a Good Thing (Salmon Poetry, 2017), and God of the Kitchen (Glass Lyre Press, 2018). He was the recipient of a 2003 Artist Fellowship Award in Poetry from the Illinois Arts Council, and his work was selected as the 2001 winner of the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize from Sarah Lawrence College.
Finally, Jon was an educator. He taught creative writing and literature, and directed undergraduate and graduate students in internships and independent study in editing and literary publishing, for the Department of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. And he led a workshop in editing at Poetry by the Sea.
Jon Tribble was born in 1962, in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he grew up. He earned a BA in English from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and an MA and MFA from Indiana University. He was married for thirty years to the poet and educator Allison Joseph, whom he met at IU Bloomington. He died on October 2, 2019.