William Logan

William Logan was born in 1950 in Boston and raised in a fishing village on the southern coast of Massachusetts. He received his BA from Yale University in 1972 and his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1975.

Logan is the author of several poetry collections, including Rift of Light (Penguin, 2017); Madame X (Penguin, 2012); Deception Island: Selected Early Poems, 1974–1999 (Salt Publishing, 2011); Strange Flesh (Penguin, 2008); and The Whispering Gallery (Penguin, 2005). He is also the author of seven books of criticism, including Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (Columbia University Press, 2018), Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry (Columbia University Press, 2014), and Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue (Columbia University Press, 2009).

Logan’s honors include the Sewanee Review’s Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, the National Book Critics Circle’s Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, the Peter I. B Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, Poetry’s J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize, and the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism. He has also been the recipient of grants from Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Florida Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The former director of the University of Florida’s creative writing program from 1983 to 2000, Logan has written poetry criticism for the New York Times Book Review and teaches at the University of Florida. He splits his time between Gainesville, Florida, and Cambridge, England.