Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing

Karl Kirchwey holds degrees in English Literature from Yale College (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.A.). He is the author of four books of poems: A Wandering Island (Princeton University Press, 1990; recipient of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America), Those I Guard (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1993), The Engrafted Word (Henry Holt, 1998; a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”) and At the Palace of Jove (Putnam, 2002). His play in verse entitled Airedales & Cipher, based on the Alcestis of Euripides, received the 1997 Paris Review Prize for Poetic Drama and has been presented in public readings at An Appalachian Summer Festival (Boone, North Carolina) and at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York. His poems have appeared in periodicals such as Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Criterion, The New Republic The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Parnassus, Partisan Review, Poetry (Chicago), Slate, The Southwest Review, Tin House, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. His poems and translations have been anthologized in works including The KGB Bar Book of Poems (2000), The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1987-1998 (1998), Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry: a Bilingual Anthology (1996), Twentieth Century Poems on the Gospels: an Anthology (1996), and After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1995).

Karl Kirchwey has been the recipient of grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts, and also received a Rome Prize in Literature in 1994-95. From 1987 to 2000, he was Director of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. He has taught creative writing and literature at Smith College, Yale and Wesleyan Universities, and in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University. He received the Rosalind Schwartz Teaching Award from Bryn Mawr College in 2003.

Courses Taught:

• CSem 002 - Classical Myth and the Contemporary Imagination
  
• Engl. 232 - Voices In and Out of School: American Poetry Since World War II
  
• ArtW159 - Introduction to Creative Writing
  
• ArtW261  - Writing Poetry I
  
• ArtW263  - Writing Memoir I
  
• ArtW361 - Writing Poetry II
  
• ArtW366 - Writing Memoir II
  
• ArtW367 - Advanced Fiction & Nonfiction (coordinator)
  
• ArtW382 - Poetry Master Class (coordinator)