Joseph Stroud

Joseph Stroud was born in 1943 in Glendale, California, and studied at the University of San Francisco, California State University at Los Angeles, and San Francisco State University.

He is the author of five books of poetry: Of This World: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), recipient of the Poetry Center Book Award; Country of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2004); Below Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 1998); Signatures (BOA Editions, 1982); and In the Sleep of Rivers (Capra Press, 1974). His honors include a Pushcart Prize and a Witter Bynner Fellowship for Poetry from the Library of Congress. He received the 2014 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2011, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Stroud’s poems are diverse in style, as his collections contain mixes of narrative prose poems, lyrical works, odes, contemplations, and more. There is a strong global influence in Stroud’s poetry, from the diverse poets he takes his cues from—Li Po, Federico García Lorca, William Blake, John Milton, and Pablo Neruda—to the landscapes explored in the poems, from Vietnam to Laos, India, Mexico, and Spain.

Stroud taught writing and literature at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, for thirty-five years. He is currently retired and divides his time between Santa Cruz, California, and Shay Creek in the Sierra Nevada mountains.