U.S. Poet Laureate, 1990-1991
1992 Bobbitt Prize Winner
Mark Strand was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1934. He published nearly 20 poetry collections, including Almost Invisible (2012); Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Continuous Life (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress; and Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964). He also published five books of prose, five volumes of translation, and multiple children’s books. Strand received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the MacArthur and Ingram Merrill Foundations. His awards included the Bollingen Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1981, served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1990-1991, and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for five years. He taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Utah, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University, and had been a visiting professor at University of Virginia, Yale, and Harvard. Mark Strand died in 2014.
Videos with Mark Strand
Audio Recordings with Mark Strand
- Mark Strand reading his poems with comment in the Recording Laboratory, April 23, 1969
- Jim Harrison and Mark Strand reading and discussing their poems in the Coolidge Auditorium, March 3, 1975
- Poetry in English at the Library of Congress: A poetry reading by Mark Strand on April 13, 1987
- Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry Mark Strand reading his poems in the Montpelier Room, May 2, 1992
- Views of the mysterious hill: the appearance of Parnassus in American poetry; lecture by Mark Strand in the Montpelier Room, Oct. 1, 1990