John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He is the author of more than 20 poetry collections, including Some Trees (1956), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected by W. H. Auden; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and A Wave (1984), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize. Ashbery is also the author of three plays, a novel, six books of prose, and two translations. His many additional honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He served as the Poet Laureate of New York State for two years and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for more than 10 years. An art critic for New York and Newsweek magazines, Ashbery served on the ARTNews editorial board until 1972. He was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, where he taught until 2008. John Ashbery died in 2017.
Audio Recordings of John Ashbery
- As part of Poetry in English at the Library of Congress, John Ashbery and Charles Simic reading and discussing their poems on November 24, 1975
- John Ashbery and David Bottoms reading their poetry in the Coolidge Auditorium, Feb. 24, 1987