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Biographies Stanley Kunitz

U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1974-1976

U.S. Poet Laureate, 2000-2001

Stanley Kunitz, U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1974-1976. Photo credit: Smith College.

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905. In addition to editing, translating, and co-translating a number of books, Kunitz was the author of 12 collections of poetry, including Selected Poems, 1928-1958 (1958), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995), winner of the National Book Award; and The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (2000). His other honors include a National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal. Kunitz twice served as the nation’s poet: as Consultant in Poetry from 1974-1976, and as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry from 2000-2001. He taught at Bennington College, New York State Teachers College, the New School for Social Research, the University of Washington, Queens College, and Yale University, among other places. Stanley Kunitz died in 2006.

Audio Recordings of Stanley Kunitz

Selected Works at the Library of Congress