National Endowment for the Arts  
News Room
 

Second Annual Poetry Pavilion at the National Book Festival

Author Biographies

Dana Gioia
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Dana Gioia is an award-winning poet and critic. His third collection of poetry, Interrogations at Noon (Graywolf, 2002), won the American Book Award. Also a best-selling anthologist, Gioia’s poetry, essays, translations, and criticism frequently appear in numerous publications. His many books include Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), and Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf, 1991; 2001). He has taught as a visiting writer at Colorado College, Johns Hopkins University, Sarah Lawrence College, Mercer University, and Wesleyan University

R.S. Gwynn
R.S. Gwynn, noted poet, anthologist and critic, is recipient of the 2004 Michael Braude Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 1991 John Gould Fletcher Award for Poetry. His works include The Area Code of God (1994) and No Word of Farewell: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 (Story Line Press, 2001). He is also editor of Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Longman, 2004) and Contemporary American Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Longman, 2004). He lives in Beaumont, Texas, where he is professor of English at Lamar University and was honored as the 2004 University Scholar.

H. L. Hix
H.L. Hix is vice president for Academic Affairs at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He has published several books of prose and collections of poems, including Surely as Birds Fly (Truman State University Press, 2002). His poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, New England Review, Poetry and other journals. He has received numerous awards, including the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and Peregrine Smith Poetry Award, as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Suji Kwock Kim
Suji Kwock Kim was a Fulbright Scholar and a Stegner Fellow and is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, California Arts Council, Washington State Artist Trust, Korea Foundation and Blakemore Foundation for Asian Studies. Her first book of poems, Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2002), is the winner of the 2002 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, as well as the California Book Award for Best Book of Poetry (2003) and the Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ploughshares and other journals. She lives in New York City.

Ted Kooser
Ted Kooser, appointed the 13th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress beginning this fall, is the first Poet Laureate chosen from the Great Plains. A Midwesterner born in Iowa, Kooser is the author of 10 collections of poetry, including most recently Delights & Shadows: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). He is the recipient of two Society of Midland Authors Prizes for Poetry, a Nebraska Book Award for Poetry; two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, the James Boatwright Prize and a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council. Mr. Kooser is visiting professor in the English department of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

David Lehman
David Lehman is the author of five collections of poems, including The Evening Sun (Scribner, 2002) and The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (Scriber, 2000). His books of criticism include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998), which was named a "Book to Remember 1999" by the New York Public Library; and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). He edited Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems (University of Michigan, 1996), and he is series editor of The Best American Poetry (Scribner), which he initiated in 1988. He teaches at Bennington College and the New School for Social Research and divides his time between Ithaca, New York and New York City.

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim is an acclaimed poet, novelist and critic who in 1969 immigrated to the United States from Malaysia and in 1973 earned her Ph.D. in English and American literature from Brandeis University. Her works include her first book of poetry, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems (1980), which was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and her most recent, Joss and Gold (2001). She has taught both in the United States and abroad, and is currently a professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she lives.

Timothy Murphy
An accomplished poet, business executive and farmer, Timothy Murphy graduated from Yale University as Scholar of the House in Poetry in 1972. His work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Chronicles, The Dark Horse and The Formalist. His collections include Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir (2000), Very Far North (2002) and a translation (in collaboration with Alan Sullivan) of Beowulf (Longman, 2004). He lives in North Dakota, where he is the managing partner of several farms and properties.

Linda Pastan
Linda Pastan is the author of 11 collections of poetry, including the most recent, The Last Uncle: Poems (Norton, 2003). She has won numerous awards and distinctions, including the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Dylan Thomas Award, the Di Castagnola Award (Poetry Society of America), the Bess Hokin Prize (Poetry Magazine), the Maurice English Award and the Charity Randall Citation of the International Poetry Forum. She served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Breadloaf Writers Conference for 20 years. She lives in Potomac, MD.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Poet and fiction writer Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the son of a cement finisher and a cook, was born in his grandmother's house in Picacho, N.M. He studied at the University of Iowa and Stanford University as a Wallace E. Stegner fellow. His first collection of poetry, Calendar of Dust (1991), won the American Book Award. He is the author of a collection of short stories, Flowers for the Broken (1992), the novel Carry Me Like Water (1995), several children's books and a collection of poems, Elegies in Blue (Cinco Puntos Press, 2002). He teaches creative writing at the University of Texas, El Paso.

William Jay Smith
Poet, translator, children’s author, critic and memoirist William Jay Smith is of European and Choctaw Indian ancestry. He served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1968 to 1970 and has been a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters since 1975. He is the editor of several highly acclaimed collections of verse, including his 1955 children’s classic, Laughing Time, which has never been out of print and can be found in many textbooks and anthologies. His recent collections include The World Below the Window: Poems 1937-1997 (1998. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and The Cherokee Lottery (Curbstone Press, 2000). He is professor emeritus of English at Hollins College and makes his home in Cummington, Mass., and Paris.

Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Fellowship Program. Her poems have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Agni, The American Poetry Review and The Best American Poetry 2000. She has won the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for poetry, the Grolier Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize. Her first book of poems, Domestic Work (2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize. Her most recent collection of poetry is Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002), which was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. She lives in Atlanta, where she is associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University.


Return to News Index


Privacy Policy          Important Notices          Contact Us          USA.gov