David St. John has been honored with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the O.B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rome Fellowship in Literature, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His most recent book is The Red Leaves of Night (1999). His work has been published in numerous literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Harper's, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He has taught creative writing at Oberlin and Johns Hopkins and currently teaches at the University of Southern California. He lives in Venice, California.  

Photo by Molly Bendall