William Meredith

William Meredith was born in New York City in 1919. He is the author of nine books of poetry: Effort at Speech (TriQuarterly Books/
Northwestern University Press, 1997), for which he won the National Book Award; Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Cheer (1980); Hazard, the Painter (1975); Earth Walk: New and Selected Poems (1970); The Wreck of the Thresher and Other Poems (1964); The Open Sea and Other Poems (195; Ships and Other Figures (194; and Love Letter from an Impossible Land (1944), which was chosen by Archibald MacLeish for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He also edited Poets of Bulgaria (1986) and Shelley: Selected Poems (1962), and translated Alcools: Poems 1989-1913 by Guillaume Apollinaire (1964). A selection of William Meredith's prose, including memoirs, critical essays, reviews, and an interview, has been published as Poems Are Hard to Read (The University of Michigan Press, 1991).

He has received the Loines Award and a grant from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the International Vaptsarov Prize in Poetry, a grant and senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Rockefeller Foundation grants. He was a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and is a Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets. He lives in Connecticut and Florida.