William Wadsworth

William “Bill” Wadsworth received his BA in English literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a founding editor of The Madison Review. After a year of graduate studies in English at the University of Wisconsin, he moved to Europe to live with a mentor, the English poet George Barker, and Barker’s family. He later earned his MFA in poetry at Columbia University.

Wadsworth’s poems have never been collected but have been published widely in journals, including The Paris Review, Salmagundi, The New Republic, The Yale Review, Boston Review, and Tin House. His poems have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry; The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008), edited by David Lehman; and American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom (Library of America, 2006). His work has been translated into Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Wadsworth lived in an experimental community of architects and green-energy pioneers in Vermont, where he ran a small business and taught poetry in schools. After moving to New York City to attend Columbia, he served for three years as the director of a prominent literary series at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Wadsworth was appointed executive director of the Academy of American Poets in 1989. Over the ensuing decade, he oversaw the addition of new awards and prizes, including the Wallace Stevens and James Laughlin Awards, the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He also oversaw the creation of an array of new programs, including the National Reading Series; National Poetry Month (launched in April 1996); the Academy’s website, Poets.org (launched in 1997); and American Poets magazine.  

Wadsworth stepped down as executive director in 2001 and, for several years, assisted in creating and administering the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, supporting Russian artists and writers. He taught on the visiting faculty at New York University and The New School, and as an adjunct at SUNY Purchase College. From 2006 to 2021, he taught as an adjunct professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. In 2008, he was appointed as the Writing Program’s director of academic administration. Wadsworth retired as director of the Writing Program in 2020. He lives in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.