Robyn Creswell

Robyn Creswell is a critic, scholar, editor, and translator. He earned a BA in comparative literature from Brown University and an MA and PhD in the same subject from New York University.

Creswell is a regular contributor to literary journals, including The New York Review of Books, and is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2019). His translations include Iman Mersal’s collection of poetry, The Threshold (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022), for which he won the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry, as well as works by Sonallah Ibrahim and Abdelfattah Kilito.  

Creswell is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, MacDowell, and the Cullman Center at New York Public Library. He won a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2019 and was awarded the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize in the same year.

Creswell taught for several years at Brown University and served for eight years as poetry editor at The Paris Review. He is currently an associate professor of comparative literature at Yale University. He is also poetry editor-at-large at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.