photo: Betsy Bell

Richard Howard was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1951 and studied at the Sorbonne as a Fellow of the French Government. He is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including Trappings: New Poems (Turtle Point Press, 1999); Like Most Revelations: New Poems (1994); Selected Poems (1991); No Traveller (1989); Findings (1971); Untitled Subjects (1969), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize; and Quantities (1962). He has published more than 150 translations from the French, including works by Gide, Giraudoux, Cocteau, Camus, De Beauvoir, De Gaulle, Breton, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Cioran, Claude Simon, Stendhal, and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, for which he received the 1983 American Book Award for translation. He is also the author of Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950, which was first published in 1969 and expanded in 1980. In 1994 he edited the Library of America edition of the Travel Writings of Henry James, and in 1995 The Best American Poetry.

His honors include the Levinson Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government, and the PEN Translation Medal, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He was President of PEN American Center (1979-80) and Poet Laureate of New York State (1994-96). Howard formerly held teaching positions at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, where he was the Luce Visiting Scholar in 1983, and at the University of Houston from 1987 to 1997. Currently he is the poetry editor of The Paris Review and Western Humanities Review. His most recent work is a translation of Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma (Modern Library, 1999). He is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and lives in New York City where he teaches in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts, Columbia University.