Grace Schulman

Grace Schulman was born in New York, New York, in 1935. At age fourteen, she sent her first poem to Marianne Moore, a friend of her parents, marking the beginning of a long-lasting and influential friendship with the elder poet. She studied at Bard College, American University, and New York University, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on Moore’s poetry.

Schulman is the author of several poetry collections, including Without a Claim (Mariner Books, 2013); The Broken String (Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Mariner Books, 2003), which was a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Award; and Burn Down the Icons (Princeton University Press, 1976). The poet Rachel Hadas writes, “Throughout her distinguished career, Schulman’s lines have grown steadily more packed with meaning, more burnished and rich.”

Schulman, whom Harold Bloom has called “a vital and permanent poet,” is also the editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore (Viking Press, 2003) and the author of Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement (University of Illinois Press, 1986). From 1973 to 1985, she directed the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and from 1972 to 2006, she served as the poetry editor of The Nation.

Schulman has received numerous grants and awards, including the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, five Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the New York Council on the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2016, she was awarded the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. In 2019, she was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters.

Schulman, a distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, lives in New York, New York, and East Hampton, New York.