2009 Presenters
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky is the author of several collections of poetry including The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee.
He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Sounds of Poetry, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and two acclaimed works of translation.
From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.
His most recent poetry anthology is Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (W. W. Norton).
His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.
About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."
Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
