2001-2003
Billy Collins
Collins (1941- ) was born in New York City. He is one of America’s
best-selling poets. His books include “Sailing Alone Around
the Room: New and Selected Poems” in 2001, “Picnic,
Lightning” in 1998, and “The Art of Drowning” in
1995. In October 2004, Collins was the inaugural recipient of the
Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry.
He has served as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library
and he is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College,
City University of New York, where he has taught for the past 30
years.
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2003-2004
Louise Glück
Glück (1943- ) was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including “The Wild Iris,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Her poetry book “Ararat” (1990) received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. Other honors include the Bollingen Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. She teaches at Williams College. She is on the faculty of Yale University as Adjunct Professor of English Rosencranz Writer in Residence, Creative Writing. Louise Glück also served as Special Bicentennial Consultant, 1999-2000, along with Rita Dove and W.S. Merwin.
Read more about Louise Glück
2004-2006
Ted Kooser
Kooser (1939- ), who was born in Ames, Iowa, received his bachelor's
degree from Iowa State and his master's in English from the University
of Nebraska at Lincoln. He is the author of 10 collections of
poetry, including "Delights & Shadows," which won
the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. His other honors include two National
Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Pushcart Prize and the Stanley
Kunitz Prize from Columbia. He is a professor in the English department
at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Read more about Ted Kooser
2006-2007
Donald Hall
Hall (1928- ), who was born in New Haven, Conn., received his bachelor’s
degree from Harvard College and a bachelor’s in literature
from Oxford University. He has published 15 books of poetry, including
his latest, “White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected
Poems 1946-2006.” He has also written 20 books of prose,
children’s books and plays. He received the National Book
Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for his
poetry book “The One Day” (1988). He lives in New Hampshire.
Read more about Donald Hall
2007-2008
Charles Simic
Charles Simic (1938- ) was born in Yugoslavia on May 9, 1938. His
childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved
to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined
his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of
Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest
Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights
in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted
into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963. He earned his
bachelor's degree from New York University in 1966. From 1966
to 1974 he wrote and translated poetry, and he also worked as
an editorial assistant for Aperture, a photography magazine.
He married fashion designer Helen Dubin in 1964. They have two
children. He has been a U.S. citizen since 1971 and lives in Strafford,
N.H.
Read more about Charles Simic
2008-2010
Kay Ryan
Kay Ryan (1945- ) was born in 1945 in San Jose, California, and grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. For more than 30 years, she taught remedial English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California. Ryan’s poems are known for their brevity, wit, and frequent use of slant and internal rhymes. Her most recent book is The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010).
Ryan served as U.S. Poet Laureate for two terms, from 2008 to 2010. During her tenure, she initiated a poetry project that focused on poetry written by community college students across the nation. The project, "Poetry for the Mind's Joy," included a poetry-writing contest, a videoconference with students at community colleges, and designation of April 1 as Community College Poetry Day. The events were sponsored by the Library, in collaboration with the Community College Humanities Association.
Read more about Kay Ryan
2010-2011
W.S. Merwin
Merwin (1927- ) was born in New York City and educated at Princeton University. He has traveled extensively in France, Portugal, and England. He is the author of more than 20 books of poetry. A Mask for Janus, his first book in 1952, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His book Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001 won the National Book Award for poetry in 2005. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1971 for his book The Carrier of Ladders, and in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius. Merwin has also published more than 20 books of translation, numerous plays, and six books of prose.
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2011-Present
Philip Levine
Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit and was formally educated there, in the public schools and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). After a succession of industrial jobs, he left the city for good and lived in various parts of the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the state university until his retirement. For the past twelve autumns he has served as poet-in-residence at New York University. He has received many awards for his books of poems, the most recent being the National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He divides his time between Fresno, California, and Brooklyn, New York.
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