Robert Pinsky is a poet, essayist, translator, teacher and lecturer. He was the ninth U.S. Poet Laureate. His tenure was marked by ambitious efforts to prove that, contrary to popular belief, poetry is an integral part of American life. As part of his work as Poet Laureate, Pinsky created the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans—of varying backgrounds and from every state—shared videos of themselves reading their favorite poems. The project website, www.favoritepoem.org, features these videos as well as a forum for teachers and students. Pinsky has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Stanford University, and he has received numerous accolades, including the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Shelley Memorial Prize and the Oscar Blumenthal Prize. He teaches at Boston University. His most recent anthology is “The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling” (Norton), and his most recent collection of poems is “At the Foundling Hospital.”
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