Cecil S. Giscombe is a professor and Robert Hass Chair in English. An award-winning poet and essayist, he is the author or coauther of fourteen books. His work frequently centers themes of identity, race, nature, and place.
Giscombe's writing on Canada addresses aspects of the historical and continuing Black presence in British Columbia, and in particular the story of the nineteenth-century Jamaican miner and explorer John Robert Giscome, a possible relative of the author. His 1998 poetry collection Giscome Road, which explored the history of locales in northern Canada named for the pioneer, won the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry. Giscombe returned to British Columbia in Into and Out of Dislocation (2000), a travelogue that follows the writer and his family through a winter spent tracing Giscome's steps. Giscombe is intrigued in what the man he calls "John R." represents, as a Black man occupying a prominent role where the archetypal "pioneer" is white. Giscome's story challenges traditional narratives of settlement, as well as the way Canadians think about diversity in the Pacific Northwest.
Giscombe's other books include Negro Mountain, Similarly, Train Music, Ohio Railroads, and Prairie Style. His poetry and prose has been printed in Best American Poetry, the Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Bluesprint: Black British Columbia Literature and Orature, and elsewhere. He has been recognized with the Stephen Henderson Award, an American Book Award, the Carl Sandburg Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the Canadian Embassy to the United States.
