Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky is a poet, poetry teacher, and former Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000). His most recent collection of poems is At the Foundling Hospital (2016). A collection of Selected Works was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2011. His collection Gulf Music won the Theodore Roethke Prize in 2008. 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 translation of The Inferno of Dante (1994). 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 U.S. Poet Laureate, he created the Favorite 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’s translation work both feeds and extends his poetry practice. His best-selling translation The Inferno of Dante was greeted by Stephen Greenblatt as “the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante’s power. His other notable work on translation has been as a colleague and neighbor of Czesław Miłosz, assisting the great (and bilingual) Polish poet with English versions of his own work. Translation has sometimes been part of Pinsky’s writing in other, sometimes unconventional ways. For instance, one section of Pinsky’s book-length poem An Explanation of America is a close translation from the Latin of Horace’s epistile to Quinctius (Epistulae, I, xvi). Pinsky has collaborated with musicians as well, co-founding the PoemJazz project.