Don Bogen

A writer, critic, and translator, Don Bogen earned his PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the poetry collections After the Splendid Display (1986), The Known World (1997), Luster (2003), An Algebra (2009), and Immediate Song (2019).

Bogen’s poetry engages the private, public, and historical realms, often in formally innovative ways. Commenting on An Algebra, poet Ron Slate found Bogen to be “cutting narrative loose from its moorings to drift, allowing the poems to assume protean shapes, and relying on the persistence of echoing phrases as more than sufficient evidence of a fully imagined life.”

Bogen is the author of a study on Theodore Roethke, A Necessary Order: Theodore Roethke and the Writing Process (1991). He has also written about John Haines for the anthology The Wilderness of Vision: On the Poetry of John Haines (1996) and contributed a chapter on Josephine Miles to Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems (2006). His reviews have appeared in the Nation, Threepenny Review, and other venues. His book of translation Europa:  Selected Poems of Julio Martínez Mesanza appeared in 2016.

Bogen’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Camargo Foundation and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant. He received a Fulbright Senior Lectureship to Spain and the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award to Queen’s University in Belfast.

He is Nathaniel Ropes Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati and editor at large of the Cincinnati Review.