Gerald Stern is the author of many books of poetry, most recently, Save the Last Dance (2008). Stern’s other poetry collections include Everything is Burning (2005), American Sonnets: Poems (2002), Last Blue (2000), This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), winner of the National Book Award, Odd Mercy (1995), and Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, all published by W. W. Norton. His other books include Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 1990); Two Long Poems (Carnegie Mellon, 1990); Lovesick (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1987); Paradise Poems (Random House, 1984), winner of the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Red Coal (Houghton Mifflin, 1981); and Lucky Life (Houghton Mifflin, 1977), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and chosen as the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection, and Rejoicings (Metro Book Co., 1973).

A four-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Stern has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is the winner of the The Paris Review’s Bernard Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Pennsylvania Governor General’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. In 2006, Stern was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. After many years teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Stern now lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.  

Photo by Martin Desht