B. 1953
Headshot of poet Rosanna Warren outdoors.
Photo by Joel Cohen

Rosanna Warren was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, to a pair of writers: Robert Penn Warren, a major poet and novelist, and Eleanor Clark, a prize-winning author of criticism, fiction, and travel books. She earned her BA in painting from Yale University and an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Warren is the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She has also taught at Vanderbilt University and Boston University, and in several medium security prisons.

Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008. Her most recent books of poems are Departure (2003) and Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). A contributor and editor for many volumes of translation, she translated Euripides’s Suppliant Women (1995), with Stephen Scully, and edited a volume on The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (1989).

She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. From 2008 to 2009, she was a fellow of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.