Gerald Stern is the author of many books of poetry, most recently, Save the Last Dance (2008). His other poetry collections include Everything Is Burning (2005); American Sonnets (2002); Last Blue (2000); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); and Bread Without Sugar (1992), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize, all published by W.W. Norton & Company. He is also the author of Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 1990); Two Long Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1990); Lovesick (Harper & Row, 1987); Paradise Poems (Random House, 1984), winner of the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Red Coal (Houghton Mifflin, 1981); 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, 1973). A four-time recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stern has also 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 Paris Review’s Bernard F. 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 a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He taught for many years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 
Photo by Martin Desht