Jim Moore

Jim Moore (1943-) was born in Illinois but attended the University of Minnesota. He then went on to the Writer’s Workshop in Iowa where he received his M.A. degree. He taught at a college in Illinois, and because he was a professor, he qualified for the teacher’s deferment of military service, which kept him out of the draft for the Vietnam War. After two students from the college dropped out, were drafted, sent overseas, and killed in Vietnam, Moore could no longer accept deferment. He also refused to be drafted and was sent to prison for ten months; there, Moore’s inmates asked him to teach a poetry class once they found out that he was a poet, and Moore did. Currently, Moore splits his time between Minneapolis—where he teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University—and Spoleto, Italy.

Moore’s time in prison inspired much of the work in his first three poetry collections. He was in the LaGuardia Airport in 1975 when a bomb in baggage claim exploded. This experience, too, inspired his writing. Moore has written six collections of poetry, including Invisible Strings and Writing With Tagore Above the Flamina. Three of his collections, The Long Experience of Love, The Freedom of History, and Lightning at Dinner, are recipients of Minnesota Book Awards. In 2002, Moore won the Loft-McKnight Award in Poetry, and he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.