New York, February 24, 2005—Tree Swenson, Executive Director of The Academy of American Poets, announced that Robert Pinsky, Susan Stewart, and C. K. Williams have been elected to the Board of Chancellors, the Academy's advisory board of distinguished poets. They join current Chancellors Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, Susan Howe, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Nathaniel Mackey, Heather McHugh, Gary Snyder, James Tate, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Rosanna Warren.
Robert Pinsky is the author of six books of poetry: Jersey Rain (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which won the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975). In 1997, he was named the United States Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress, where he established the Favorite Poem Project. He has also published five books of criticism, including Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton, 2002), The Sounds of Poetry (1998), Poetry and the World (1988), and The Situation of Poetry (1977); three Favorite Poem anthologies; two books of translation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass). His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry Magazine's Oscar Blumenthal prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.
Poet and critic Susan Stewart has published several collections of poetry, including Columbarium (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Forest (1995), and Yellow Stars and Ice (1981). Her books of criticism include The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2004), Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism; On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1993); Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991); and Nonsense (1989). She also co-translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith, and the poetry and prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini. She is the recipient of a Lila Wallace Individual Writer's Award, two grants in poetry from the National Endowment in the Arts, a Pew Fellowship for the Arts, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She is Professor of English at Princeton University where she teaches the history of poetry and aesthetics.
C. K. Williams is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Singing (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003); Repair (1999), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize; The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969). Williams has also published five works of translation: Selected Poems of Francis Ponge (1994); Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski (with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, 1991); The Bacchae of Euripides (1990); The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling. (Poems from Issa) (1983); and Women of Trachis, by Sophocles (with Gregory Dickerson, 1978). Among his many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris.
The Board of Chancellors was established in 1946 for the purpose of electing Academy Fellows, and to advise the Academy on literary matters. Chancellors of the Academy have included Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, and James Merrill, among others. Recipients of the annual Fellowship have included poets E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Hayden, and more recently, Charles Simic, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lyn Hejinian, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Sharon Olds.
The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. To fulfill this mission, the Academy administers many important programs, including National Poetry Month (April), the largest literary celebration in the world; the Online Poetry Classroom, an online resource providing free poetry lesson plans for high school teachers; the Poetry Audio Archive, a collection of nearly 500 recordings dating back to the 1960s; and Poets.org, our award-winning website which provides a wealth of content on contemporary American poetry and receives over 400,000 unique visitors each month. The Academy also conducts High School Poetry Workshops for New York City students and publishes the biannual journal, American Poet. In addition, the Academy administers the most important collection of poetry awards in the United States. These awards include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the James Laughlin Award, the Walt Whitman Award, the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and student prizes at nearly 200 colleges and universities nationwide. The Academy is recognized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization by the Internal Revenue Service.