Rosanna Warren

1953 –
Read poems by this poet

Rosanna Warren was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, on July 27, 1953. She studied painting at Yale University, where she graduated in 1976, and earned an MA in 1980 from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Warren is the author of So Forth (W. W. Norton, 2020); Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters (W. W. Norton, 2020); Ghost in a Red Hat (W. W. Norton, 2011); Departure (W. W. Norton, 2003); Stained Glass (W. W. Norton, 1993), which was named the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets; Each Leaf Shines Separate (W. W. Norton & Company, 1984); and Snow Day (Palaemon Press Limited, 1981). She has also published a translation of Euripides’s Suppliant Women (with Stephen Scully; Oxford, 1995), a book of literary criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2008), and has edited several books, including The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern, 1989).

“Rosanna Warren lives in our tarnished, everyday, ramshackle world of loss, anguish, and sacrifice,” writes poet Anthony Hecht, “but she inhabits almost as vividly a realm of classic purity; and in some of her best, most moving poems she dwells in both regions at once, and within, as it seems, the same breath. It is a beautiful miracle of bilocation.”

Warren’s awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Award of Merit in Poetry and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the May Sarton Prize, the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Ingram Merrill Grant for Poetry, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award, The Nation/ “Discovery” Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Warren served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. In the fall of 2000, she was the New York Times resident-in- literature at the American Academy in Rome. She is a contributing editor of Seneca Review and the former poetry editor of Daedalus. She was the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. She is a professor at the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago and lives in Chicago.