Air Traffic
A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America
From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: an extraordinary memoir and blistering meditation on fatherhood, race, addiction, and ambition.
Gregory Pardlo's father was a brilliant and charismatic man--a leading labor organizer who presided over a happy suburban family of four. But when he loses his job following the famous air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, he succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family's money on more and more ostentatious whims. In the face of this troubling model and disillusioned presence in the household, young Gregory rebels. Struggling to distinguish himself on his own terms, he hustles off to Marine Corps boot camp. He moves across the world, returning to the United States only to take a job as a manager-cum-barfly at…
$22.95
March 19, 2019GREGORY PARDLO's collection Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Pardlo is poetry editor at Virginia Quarterly Review and director of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.
Spectral Evidence
Gregory Pardlo
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Weldon Johnson; Introduction by Gregory Pardlo