Bruce Weigl is the author of 12 collections of poetry, most recently Declension in the Village of Chung Luong which created “an eloquent spokesman for an entire generation of Americans whose lives were broken by the war and a country whose moral confusion desperately needed addressing.” His memoir, The Circle of Hahn, tells of his childhood in Ohio; his induction into the U.S. Army in 1967, and year in Vietnam that led to his passion for that country’s poetry and culture; and of a redemptive meeting in 1996 with his daughter-to-be at an orphanage outside Hanoi. He also has three collections of essays as well as translating and publishing books of Vietnamese poetry. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harpers, and many other publications. In 2006 he was awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
His awards include the Paterson Poetry Prize, Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Yaddo Foundation, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Poet’s Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His poetry titles include The Monkey Wars (University of Georgia, 1985); The Song of Napalm (Grove, 1988); What Saves Us (Triquarterly, 1992); Sweet Lorain (Triquarterly, 1996); Archaeology of the Circle (Grove, 1999); After the Others (Triquarterly, 1999); The Unraveling Strangeness (Grove, 2002); Declension in the Village of Chung Luong (Ausable, 2006).
After teaching for many years at Penn State, he returned in 1998 to Lorain, Ohio where he holds the position of Distinguished Visiting Writer at Lorain County Community College.