Author Bio: GREGORY PARDLO's Collection Digest (Four Way Books) Won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Author Bio: GREGORY PARDLO's collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Digest was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award, named a standout book by the Academy of American Poets, a New York Times best poetry book of the year, and a finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and INDIEFAB Book of the Year. Gregory Pardlo's other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His first poetry collection, Totem, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in 2007. Author Personal Info: He plays tennis & ping pong. He Ain’t Heavy They were a trio, a triangle perhaps, of love, as many would claim after City High broke up. In addition to my brother Robbie, the R&B group included Ryan and Claudette, both of whom Robbie had recruited. All three had attended Willingboro High School. A year after he graduated, Robbie signed with Booga Basement Records, a recording company that grew out of the small studio in South Orange, NJ where The Fugees recorded The Score. Claudette, Robbie’s girlfriend at the time, was two grades behind him, and had not yet graduated. She was pretty, racially ambiguous, and, much to everyone’s surprise, she could arguably carry a tune. They added the elder Ryan Toby, who had already achieved some notoriety as the kid who sang “Oh, Happy Day” with Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2. For whatever reason—jealousy, youth, hubris—City High never jelled. They remained as disinterested in each other’s careers as commuters carpooling to a common office park. Robbie took it personally. He was profligate, reactionary, believing that was the nature of generosity. With money, he had the discretion of a leaf blower. He bought expensive clothes for people he hardly knew, then clothes for himself, and like some lotto-opulent hoarder, he let the clothes heap up, mounds of them on his bedroom floor in the house he still shared with our parents—so many nauseating emblems of the skin he couldn’t shed fast enough. Within five years of City High’s break up, more than a million dollars had burned its way through my brother’s W-2’s. My mother pinched the occasional royalty check and invested it for him, but so many unscrupulous parents of famous children had muddied the line between a mother’s imperative and grand larceny. From the outside, City High’s success looked so carefree that I thought Robbie was contriving petty dramas first with Claudette and Ryan, then with the ensemble of women he paraded through my parents’ house. That’s how it started, I thought, mistakenly, him getting lost that self-made labyrinth again and again as a cry for attention. Again and again, my mother would tie a rope around herself, and wade in to fish him out. All that operatic weeping and screaming, and storming into the night to make people worry about him. I’m sorry I didn’t take any of it seriously. Not until 2009 when we held an intervention for Robbie, and that intervention forced us all onto the stage of his commedia dell’arte. My brother dismantled his music career in a series of alternating excesses dropping like feet in an iambic line: the blackout and the shapeshifting rage. This went on until no one in the industry would risk working with him. Even though they released a Grammy-nominated album, City High was not yet enough of a commodity for people in the industry to suffer Robbie’s inebriated, uncooperative and belligerent company. A manic-depressive, he had been born to heartbreak, and alcohol provided at least a reason for the hurt that he couldn’t locate long enough to conquer. “I like the not-giving-a-fuck” you get from being drunk, he’d later tell television cameras on A&E’s Intervention. When he was a toddler, my mother worried that Robbie and I wouldn’t bond, that he would languish in the long shadow I cast across the decade that separated us. Per her instructions, I’d pack him and his snack bag into his stroller, and push him around the neighborhood to wherever my friends were hanging out. My hangout radius was often defined by my access to the bathrooms of friendly neighbors. I had established a network of safe houses where I could get Robbie to a potty in an emergency. Some neighbors called me by my code name, “Gweg-Gweg,” which they’d heard Robbie yell from behind a bathroom door when he needed me to come and help him wipe. Robbie was my father’s sidekick, too. To hear them tell it, their adventures were quixotic and epic. His nickname for Robbie was “Babakazoo,” after a character in the movie Thank God It’s Friday. Whenever he was feeling nostalgic, Big Greg would remind us how when Robbie was little, he used to load Robbie into the car and set out with a single objective: to explore strange new worlds. “What are going to do today, Babakazoo,” my father would ask excitedly. Employing a tagline worthy of a child star, Robbie would reply, “Dad, we’re gunna go and see!” He was precocious in some ways, but Robbie proved to be less resourceful in school than I had been. She hired tutors. Looking for ways to build his self-esteem, she’d signed him up for PAL football. In step with Robbie’s age, my mom’s concerns escalated from yellow alert to red as Robbie’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. Still, it was a surprise to me when my mom boasted of a new drug, Ritalin, that she hoped would be Robbie’s minder when none of us were around. She protected him from impatient teachers, and dodged administrators who recommended remedial classes with extracurricular detentions and suspensions. She hustled Robbie through an assortment of public and Catholic schools in our suburban South Jersey, which meant she often had to organize her life around dropping him off and picking him up. My mother always knew--in ways that I did not because she sheltered me from such fears—that, unprotected, black boys like Robbie could easily get lost like a marble in the Rube Goldberg machine of public education, and quietly collected, in the end, in the eager baskets of the criminal justice system. My mother was the real brains of the outfit. People my mother did not give birth to said she looked like Tina Turner. A politely laughable observation, it referred mostly to their similar skin tone. If there were other similarities worth considering, they weren’t superficial. My mom wanted our house to be full of music and art like the house she grew up in—minus the drunk drama, of course. Even before Robbie was born, she had hired a piano teacher to come to our house once a week. Unfortunately, the only person available to be taught how to play the piano was me. My father, who’d never played an instrument, encouraged me to keep up with my lessons because he’d watched a boy once capture everyone’s attention at a house party just by poking at a few keys. “He stole my thunder,” said my father, who was used to being the center of attention, as though the party were a competition he could only lose to someone who was aided by a prop. I hated practicing, and the suggestion that I should do so for some vicarious revenge on the universe made it less likely that I would ever enjoy playing. I abandoned the piano, but before my voice changed, and I lost interest, I had an admirable run in the All South Jersey Choir. When my parents discovered that Robbie could sing, they were popping champagne bottles like ballplayers in a locker room. “He hit that note,” my father would drawl whenever he told the story about Robbie’s maiden performance at a middle school talent show, “and grown women were falling out in the aisles!” My father measured success in art by the degrees of female enchantment and male envy it inspired, but it was maternal pragmatism that guided Robbie toward the heights that music promised him. Music, my mom determined, would protect his institutionally endangered life. What began as a kind of rescue operation, however, settled into martial law, and soon Operation Stage & Studio became for my parents and for Robbie, a mandate for achievement. Because it had a celebrated music program, my mother let Robbie go to our town’s public high school—Willingboro High—for his junior and senior years. By the time he graduated in 1997, my brother had already participated in summer programs at Freedom Theater in Philadelphia, and Berklee College of music in Boston. Dispatches from Robbie’s life in the music industry reached me like gossip, and like much gossip, they inspired envy. In 1998, I was a thirty-year-old junior in college, and my little brother who was not even old enough to drink was singing backup vocals on Whitney Houston’s “My Love Is Your Love.” My little brother was voice-training with Teddy Pendergrass. He also had a cut on the soundtrack for the movie, Life, starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. The song that appeared on that soundtrack, “What Would You Do,” was credited to that fledgling group calling itself “City High.” Pop music fans generally misinterpreted City High’s hit song, “What Would You Do,” as social critique.

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