Mr. Pinsky teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston
University. His most recent publications are The Handbook of Heartbreak:
101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow and The Sounds of Poetry: A
Brief Guide, which Mr. Pinsky describes as “a brief, plain book
about how to hear poems.” Mr. Pinsky’s other works include the collections
of his poetry The Sadness And Happiness (1975); An Explanation
of America (1980), awarded the Saxifrage Prize as the year’s best
volume of poetry from a small or university press; History of My
Heart (1984), which won the William Carlos Williams Prize in 1995;
The Want Bone (1990); and The Figured Wheel: New and Collected
Poems, 1966-1996 (1995), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
in poetry. He is co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, by
Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz (1983). His verse translation of The
Inferno of Dante (1994) was awarded the Los Angeles Times
Book Prize in poetry and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award,
given by the Academy of American Poets. His writing has won awards from
the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and
the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Having served
as poetry editor of The New Republic through much of the 1980s,
he is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate,
and a contributor to “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS television,
reading poems related to current events. Mr. Pinsky has also introduced
several early recordings of Favorite Poem Project volunteers on “Anthem,”
a weekly cultural program on National Public Radio.
