Daniel Halpern

1945 –
Read poems by this poet

Born in Syracuse, New York, on September 11, 1945, Daniel Halpern is a poet and the publisher and president of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Halpern is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Air (Copper Canyon Press, 2026); Something Shining (Alfred K. Knopf, 1999); and Foreign Neon (Alfred A. Knopf 1991).

For twenty-five years Halpern edited the international literary magazine Antaeus, which he founded in Tangier, Morocco, with writer Paul Bowles. Halpern has also edited many anthologies including Reading the Fights: The Best Writing About the Most Controversial of Sports  (Prentice Hall Direct, 1990), which he coedited with Joyce Carol Oates; The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories (Penguin Books, 2000); and The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories, 1945–1985 (Penguin Books, 1987).

Of his work, the poet Derek Walcott writes:

The quality of memory that Halpern strives after in poem after poem and which he repeatedly achieves is that nod of agreement which truth gives to experience, whether of praise or of pain.

Halpern has received numerous grants and awards, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the 1993 PEN Publishers Citation. In 2009, he received the first Editor’s Award, bestowed by Poets and Writers.

From 1975 to 1995, Halpern taught in the graduate writing program of Columbia University, which he chaired for many years. He has also taught at The New School for Social Research and Princeton University. Halpern lives in New York and Princeton, New Jersey.