Graduate School of Arts & Sciences : English Department  

Fiction
 Leslie Epstein
 Ha Jin
 Allegra Goodman

Poetry
 Robert Pinsky
 David Ferry
 Louise Glück
 Derek Walcott
   (also Playwriting)
 Rosanna Warren

Playwriting
 Kate Snodgrass
 Richard Schotter

Robert Pinsky - Poetry


Full CV

Robert Pinsky leads a poetry workshop each semester with students enrolled in the graduate writing program. At the end of the year, he works with students on completing their final theses.

Robert Pinsky is poetry editor for the online magazine Slate, and he reads poems as a contributor to public television’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Gulf Music, his most recent collection of poems, is due out in the fall of 2007. Jersey Rain was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2000. The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and received both the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. His other awards include the Shelley Memorial Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, as well as the Howard Morton Landon Translation Prize for his best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

During Pinsky’s tenure as Poet Laureate of the United States, from 1997-2000, he created the Favourite Poem Project to document, promote, and celebrate poetry’s place in American culture. In addition to the anthologies, the project has produced 50 short documentaries showcasing Americans reading and speaking about poems they love. The project website, www.favoritepoem.org, features these videos, as well as a forum for teachers and students, including lesson plans developed at the Summer Poetry Institutes hosted at Boston University in 2001-2003.

Pinsky is co-editor of Americans’ Favorite Poems and Poems to Read, both anthologies that grew out of the Favorite Poem Project. A third project anthology, An Invitation To Poetry, is forthcoming from Norton next year, and will be packaged with a DVD containing many of the project videos.

Among his prose works are The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide and his recent Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry.

Born in 1940 in the seashore resort of Long Branch, New Jersey, Robert Pinsky attended Long Branch High School, Rutgers College, and Stanford University, where he held a Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing. He taught at Wellesly College and the University of California at Berkeley before coming to Boston University.