Patrick Donnelly was born on September 25, 1956, in Tucson, Arizona, and received his master’s degree in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is the author of two books of poetry: Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012) and The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003). He is also cotranslator, with Stephen D. Miller, of the 141 Japanese poems in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013).
Of his second book, Jane Hirshfield writes, “This is a book as rare for the tuning fork accuracies of its language and encyclopaedic breadth of its knowledge as for the fearlessness of its feeling. Patrick Donnelly's urgent and brilliant poems embrace the omnivorous bonfires of transience and desire; by that permeable vow, they enter the surety of the lasting.”
Donnelly is the recipient of a 2008 Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry, the Richard Soref Scholarship in Poetry, and two grants from the PEN American Center’s Fund for Writers and Editors with AIDS. In 2015, he was named the seventh poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.
He is a former associate editor at Four Way Books and currently serves as an associate editor of Poetry International, contributing editor of Tran(s)tudies, and director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place. He teaches at Smith College and lives in South Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Bibliography
Poetry
Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012)
The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003)
Translation
The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period, with Stephen D. Miller (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013)
