Letterpress printed broadside of the title poem from In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan, 2014). 

Peter Gizzi is the author of In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan, 2014),Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011), The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992). In 2004 Salt Publishing of England reprinted an expanded edition of his first book as Periplum and other poems 1987-92. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized here and abroad.

His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry (1993), The Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). In 2011 he was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University.

He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L'Atlantique, the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM), and Tamaas.

His editing projects have included o·blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993), The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995), The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), and with Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). From 2007 to 2011 he was the Poetry Editor for The Nation. Since 2003, he has been a contributing editor to the journal, Conjunctions.

He has been on the faculty at Brown University (1993-94), the University of California, Santa Cruz (1995-2001), the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa (1998, 2007), The University of New Orleans Summer Program in Madrid (2004), Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg (2006), The Writer’s Workshop at The University of Iowa (Fall 2008), and Cambridge University (2011). He currently works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.