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Speaking of Stories transforming
short stories from the page to the stage
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ROBERT PINSKY Born in 1940 in the seashore resort of Long Branch, New Jersey, Robert Pinsky attended Long Branch High School, Rutgers College, and Stanford University, where he held a Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Ellen Pinsky. To Robert Pinsky poetry is a musical experience. His unprecedented three-year tenure as Poet Laureate of the United States (1997 -2000) was highlighted by his nation-wide Favorite Poem Project, which culminated in an archive of readings of poems for the Library of Congress. Since its launch, the Favorite Poem Project has been dedicated to celebrating, documenting, and promoting poetry’s role in Americans’ lives. The collection of 50 short video documentaries showcases individual Americans—from politicians to busboys—reading and speaking personally about poems they love. Pinsky’s own poetry reaches at times for the extra-personal, the mythic or abstract; at other times, his poetry moves through personal or confessional modes. The New York Times describes one of Pinsky’s greatest accomplishments as “the way he recoups for poetry some of the pleasure of prose: storytelling, humor, the rich texture of a world filled with people and ideas.” Robert Pinsky is currently poetry editor of the online journal Slate and a contributor to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. His collection The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1965-1995 was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and also received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. His book-length poem, An Explanation of America, awarded the Saxifrage Prize when it was first published in 1980, has been published by Princeton University Press in a new edition. History of My Heart, chosen for the 1985 William Carlos Williams Prize of the Poetry Society of America, has also been published in a new edition. His collection of essays, Poetry and the World, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. His book The Inferno of Dante, a new verse translation, was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. A Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor’s Choice, The Inferno of Dante was a national bestseller. It has been celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt as “the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante’s power.” Recent works by Robert Pinsky include The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide, The Handbook of Heartbreak, Jersey Rain, and Americans' Favorite Poems. In the late summer of 2004, WW Norton will publish the 3rd Favorite Poem Project anthology entitled Invitation to Poetry, which will include a DVD collection of Americans reading their favorite poems. |