Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky’s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism, and such national enthusiasm in response, that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world.

Elegant and tough, vividly imaginative, Pinsky’s poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy and range. He is the author of The Want Bone, First Things to Hand, Gulf Music, Jersey Rain, History of My Heart (winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize), The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), At the Foundling Hospital and Proverbs of Limbo. A career-spanning collection, Selected Poems, was published in 2011. His memoir Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet was called "judiciously episodic and richly involving" by Booklist. His first two books of poetry, Sadness and Happiness and An Explanation of America, have been released in a single volume with a new forward by the author titled Robert Pinsky: The First Two Books of Poems (Princeton University Press, May 26, 2026).

As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans shared their favorite poems. The project created three anthologies, Americans' Favorite Poems, An Invitation to Poetry, and Poems to Read. Other edited anthologies include Singing School: Learning to Read (and Write) Poetry by Studying with the Masters, a unique combination of anthology, personal essay and textbook, and The Book Of Poetry For Hard Times. He also edited The Best of the Best American Poetry, the twenty-fifth volume of the popular series.

Robert Pinsky’s bestselling translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Pinsky’s prose book, The Life of David, is a lively retelling and examination of the David stories. Pinsky also wrote the libretto for Tod Machover’s opera Death and the Powers: A Robot Pageant, and translated and adapted Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein. Pinsky often performs his poems with eminent jazz musicians, in venues ranging from schools and universities to jazz clubs. His works PoemJazz and PoemJazz II House Hour, with Grammy-winning pianist Laurence Hobgood, were released by Circumstantial Productions. Proverbs of Limbo: PoemJazz III is available on Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

Pinsky's two earlier works of criticism,The Situation of Poetry and Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, have been collected into a single volume titled On Poetry, Culture, and Democracy (Princeton University Press, May 26, 2026) with a new preface by the author. His Campbell Lectures at Rice University were published as Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town.

Robert Pinsky is the only member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report. For years a regular contributor to PBS NewsHour, he publishes frequently in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Threepenny Review and The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is also the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, Italy’s Premio Capri, the Korean Manhae Award, and Chicago's Harold Washington Award. In 2026 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. He taught in the graduate writing program at Boston University where he was a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, which is the highest honor bestowed on senior faculty members actively involved in research, scholarship, and University civic life, and teaching.

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