Professor

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My own creative work in poetry has been balanced between Europe and the United States and has been particularly concerned with the juxtapositions of antiquity with the contemporary world. I have translated poetry from French, Italian, Spanish and German, and have taught the Boston University Translation Seminar as well as in the Classical Studies and English Departments. I am also interested in close reading and practical literary criticism as it enables poets to gain a perspective on their own and others’ work.

Part of my career I have spent as a curator and administrator in the literary arts outside of academia. As Director of the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in New York and as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome, I worked to integrate poetry fully for the general public into a performance landscape of other literary genres (fiction, creative nonfiction, drama) and to think about poetry in the context of other disciplines such as music, painting, drawing and sculpture, architecture, landscape architecture, and historic preservation and conservation.

Teaching and Research Interests

  • Creative Writing Poetry workshops (undergraduate and graduate level)
  • Literary Translation
  • Prosody
  • Modernist poetry
  • Contemporary American poetry
  • Greco-Roman myth as interpreted by contemporary poets/playwrights/fiction writers
  • Poetry and the visual arts (ekphrasis)
  • The poetry of war

Selected Publications

  • More Honor in Betrayal: the Selected Poems of Giovanni Giudici, 1965-1994 (translations of the 20th century Italian poet) (forthcoming from Agincourt/Opuntia Publishers, 2026)
  • Good Apothecary (poems) (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, 2025)
  • Poems of Healing (editor) (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2021)
  • Poems of Rome (editor) (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2018)
  • Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2017)
  • Mount Lebanon (Putnam’s/Marian Wood Books, 2011)
  • Poems Under Saturn, a translation of Paul Verlaine’s Poèmes saturniens (Princeton University Press, 2011)
  • The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose (Putnam’s/Marian Wood Books, 2007)
  • At the Palace of Jove (Henry Holt, 2002)
  • The Engrafted Word (Henry Holt, 1997; a NewYork Times Notable Book of the Year)
  • Those I Guard (Harcourt Brace, 1993)
  • A Wandering Island (Princeton University Press, 1990; winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America)

Work in Progress

*Who Rides the Flame: A Family History of Wartime Loss (book-length memoir comprising poetry, prose, family correspondence and history and exploring WWII, grief and remembering)

  • Mutabor, a long poem
  • “The Watchspring of Its Tongue” and “Me Facing Every Way,” two sourcebooks (teaching anthologies) for poetry

Honors, Grants, and Awards

  • Cato Prize for Poetry (awarded by the Classics Conclave) (2016)
  • National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (Poetry) (1995)
  • Rome Prize in Literature (1994)
  • Guggenheim Fellowship (1994)
  • Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship (1993)

 

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