Born in 1941, Eamon Grennan is a Dublin native and Irish citizen who has lived in the United States for over thirty years. Educated at University College in Dublin and Harvard University, he teaches in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he is the Dexter M. Ferry, Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College.

His collections include The Quick of It, (Graywolf Press, 2005); Renvyle, Winter (special limited edition, 2003); Still Life with Waterfall (2002), winner of the Lenore Marshall Award; Selected & New Poems (2000); Relations: New & Selected Poems (1998); So It Goes (1995), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; As If It Matters (1992); What Light There Is and Other Poems (1989), a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What Light There Is (1987); and Wildly for Days (1983).

His Leopardi: Selected Poems (Princeton University Press, 1997) won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and he has published a collection of critical essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Creighton University Press, 1999).

His poems appear regularly in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, including Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The New Yorker, The Nation, Threepenny Review, and The New Republic.

In his citation for the 2003 Lenore Marshall Award, poet Robert Wrigley wrote, "Grennan would have us know—no, would have us see, feel, hear, taste, and smell—that the world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, lies chock-full with its own clarifications and rewards."

As well as a number of Pushcart Prizes, he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

He lives in Poughkeepsie, and spends as much time as he can in the West of Ireland.