Liam Rector

Liam Rector was born in Washington, D.C., on November 21, 1949. He received an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Rector’s books of poems include The Executive Director of the Fallen World (University of Chicago Press, 2006); American Prodigal (Story Line Press, 1994); and The Sorrow of Architecture (Dragon Gate Press, 1984). He coedited, with Tree Swenson, On the Poetry of Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page (University of Michigan Press, 2007) and edited The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall (Story Line Press, 1989).

“Liam Rector is one of the most linguistically liquid and gifted poets of his generation,” said poet Lucie Brock-Broido. “His is the oddest and most hallucinatory romance with Romance in American letters.”

Rector’s honors include fellowships in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he received the Friend to Writers Award from PEN New England.

Rector taught at Columbia University, The New School, Emerson College, George Mason University, and elsewhere. He founded and directed the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College and administered literary programs at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. He also served as poetry editor of Harvard Magazine and as associate editor of both Harvard Review and Agni.

Liam Rector died in Manhattan, New York, on August 15, 2007.