Robert Gibbons is the author of nine books of poetry, numerous chapbooks, and a unique study of the affinities in approaches to art in language by Charles Olson and that of Clyfford Still in paint: Olson/Still: Crossroad. In 2006 he was awarded a John Anson Kittredge Fund grant to travel and read his work at the Poetry & Politics Conference at the University of Stirling, Scotland. There, he met Ben Bollig, now at Oxford, who recorded the meeting online, writing that he is the most passionate advocate of poetry I have met. National Book Award Finalist William Heyen calls Gibbons one of the great writers of our time. In 2013, after publishing his trilogy of prose poems, This Time, Traveling Companion, and To Know Others, Various & Free, the poet was invited to give the Creative Keynote address, titled Kerouac & the Ecstatic Act of Writing, at the 2nd annual European Beat Studies Conference held at Aalborg University, Denmark. For the past 12 years he's lived and worked in Portland, Maine. Former chairman of PEN New England Richard Hoffman wrote Gibbons is in the process of sacralizing Portland, lodging it in the imagination of readers, as Williams did for Paterson, Cafavy for Alexandria, Joyce for Dublin.