Robert Hass
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco on March 1, 1941. He attended St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California and received both an MA and PhD in English from Stanford University.
Hass’s books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (Ecco Press, 2010); Time and Materials (Ecco Press, 2007), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Sun Under Wood: New Poems (Ecco Press, 1996), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Human Wishes (Ecco Press, 1989); Praise (Ecco Press, 1979), which won the William Carlos Williams Award; and Field Guide (Yale University Press, 1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series.
About Hass’s work, Kunitz wrote, “Reading a poem by Robert Hass is like stepping into the ocean when the temperature of the water is not much different from that of the air. You scarcely know, until you feel the undertow tug at you, that you have entered into another element.”
Hass has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River (Ecco Press, 1995), and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translations, including What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (Ecco Press, 2012); The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (Ecco Press, 1994); and Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (Ecco Press, 1984).
Most recently, Hass received the 2014 Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry by the Academy of American Poets. About Robert Hass, Academy of American Poets Chancellor Anne Waldman said:
Robert Hass is one of our most humanitarian poets. His poetry streams into the heart and intellect of our collective consciousness, reminding us of what matters most in this world, and in these particularly dark and challenging times. He considers with both a calm and steady meditative gaze the dignity and beauty of the quotidian, the mystery and endangered powers of Nature, the heart break of our warring realities, and the vision of a greater good. He is a national and international treasure. We all admire his generous service as poet laureate of the U.S., and for the strength, wit and lyrical beauties of his own writing poetry and po-ethics.
Hass served as poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and is a distinguished professor in poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley.
