Robert Cording

Born in Englewood, New Jersey, poet Robert Cording earned a BA at Montclair State University and a PhD at Boston College. Influenced in part by the poet George Herbert, Cording writes poems that engage themes of spiritual faith, grief, and grace. Discussing his approach to writing in an interview for Holy Cross Magazine, Cording said, “It’s self-reflective about your relationship to mortality, to the world, to those fundamental questions: Who are we? Where are we going? Why are we here? That’s what started me writing—those kinds of questions.” Cording is the author of several collections of poetry, including Life-list (1987), Heavy Grace (1996), Walking With Ruskin (2010), Only So Far (2015), and Without My Asking (2019).
 
Cording has received numerous honors for his poetry, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has served as director of From the Fishouse and was poet-in-residence at the Frost Place.
 
Cording taught for many years at the College of the Holy Cross and is now a poetry mentor in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. Cording lives in Woodstock, Connecticut.