Jack Ridl’s newest collection, Losing
Season (September, 2009, CavanKerry Press), chronicles
a year of hope and defeat on and off the basketball court in a small
town. Ridl has been named one of the 100 most influential sports
educators in America by the
Institute for International Sport and he is the son of beloved Pitt
Basketball Coach Buzz Ridl. A lifetime observing this world informs
these poems.

Broken Symmetry was
published in 2006 by Wayne State University Press and was selected by
the Society of Midland Authors as the best book of poetry for 2006, an
honor shared with poet Jeff Worley.

Ridl is the author of two other full-length collections, and three
chapbooks, including Outside the
Center Ring from Puddinghouse Publications, a collection of
circus poems published in 2006, and Against
Elegies, which was selected by Sharon Dolin and former Poet
Laureate Billy Collins for the 2001 Chapbook Award from The Center for
Book Arts in New York.

Ridl, who recently retired from teaching at Hope College for more
than 37 years and who with his wife, Julie, founded the college’s
Visiting Writers Series, is co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Poetry: Perspectives and
Responses, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, and co-editor, with Peter
Schakel, of both 250 Poems and Literature: A Portable Anthology,
also from Beford/St. Martin’s. Their Approaching
Literature in the 21st Century was published by
Bedford/St.Martin’s in 2005.

In 1996, The Carnegie Foundation named Ridl “Michigan Professor of
the Year.” He was chosen by the Hope College students for the “HOPE
Award” given to “Hope’s Outstanding Professor Educator,” was selected
the student body’s “Favorite Professor” in 2003, and has twice been
asked by the students to give the college’s commencement address.

In the past 15 years, more than 50 of Ridl’s former students have
gone on to MFA programs and have published their work nationally.

Ridl grew up in both the world of basketball where his father was a
well-known head coach at Westminster College and the University of
Pittsburgh, and the world of the circus, inherited from his mother’s
family.

Of his poems, Naomi Shihab Nye has written, “Jack Ridl writes with
complete generosity and full-hearted wisdom and care. His deeply
intelligent, funny, and gracious poems befriend a reader so completely
and warmly, we might all have the revelation that our lives are rich
poems too. What a gift!”

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote: “Against Elegies arises from a sense
of curiosity about life in both its plain and puzzling aspects. These
poems feel their way forward and are attentive enough to the reader to
make us feel included–happy accomplices to his search.”

Richard Jones wrote, “A sweet intelligence and compassionate eye are
the hallmark of these wise poems–just the sort of art we need in these
dark and unenlightened times.”

Conrad Hilberry has written “one group of poems is unmatched, I
believe, anywhere in American poetry. I mean the sports poems. They are
so compelling, so varied, so familiar to anyone who knows high school
and sports that they may well introduce a new genre.”

And Bob Hicok wrote of Broken Symmetry, “Ridl reinvigorates the
familiar through his fidelity to the people and the objects in his life.
This is a full and lasting collection.”

Ridl’s speaking
calendar, publications
list and ordering information are kept up-to-date at www.ridl.com.

Ridl lives along a creek that winds into Lake Michigan with his wife,
Julie, two dogs and two cats. His daughter is the artist, Meridith
Ridl.