Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He earned his BA from Johns Hopkins University and did graduate work at the University of California-Irvine and the University of Maine. His many collections of poetry include The White Words (1983); When (1997), which won a Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry; Subject Matter (2003); Scattered Chapters: New & Selected Poems (2008); Impenitent Notes (2010); and Unidentified Sighing Objects (2015). His works of prose include the collection of biographical essays Legends of the Slow Explosion (2018), the novel Teach Us That Peace (2013), the short story collection The Poetry Life: Ten Stories (2008), and a memoir of the years he and his family spent living off the grid in Maine, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living off the Grid (2006). With David Cappella, Wormser has written two books on poetry and pedagogy: Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (1999) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day (2000).
 
Wormser was a librarian for 25 years in Madison, Maine. He has taught at the University of Maine-Farmington and, since 2009, in the MFA program at Fairfield University. He served as poet laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2006. Wormser’s many honors and awards include a Frederick Bock Prize and fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, New Hampshire, and continues to work in schools. Wormser lives with his wife, Janet, in Montpelier, Vermont.