Poet, critic, and professor James Longenbach wrote primarily on modernist and contemporary poetry. He is the author of the critical works Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (1988), Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (1991), Modern Poetry After Modernism (1997), The Resistance to Poetry (2004), The Art of the Poetic Line (2008), The Virtues of Poetry (2013), How Poems Get Made (2018), and The Lyric Now (2020).

His poetry collections include Threshold (1998), Fleet River (2003), Draft of a Letter (2007), The Iron Key (2010), Earthling (2017), and Forever (2021). Influenced by Yeats and Stevens, Longenbach connects ordinary events with cultural and historical references such as myths, wars, Venice, and Petrarch. Reviewing The Iron Key, Dan Radar noted, “like [Elizabeth] Bishop, Longenbach embraces high lyricism. His poems are tightly conceived, elegantly architectural, and sophisticatedly enunciated.” His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and several editions of The Best American Poetry; his essays and reviews of contemporary poetry have been published in the Boston Review, the Nation, and the New York Times.

Longenbach was married to the novelist Joanna Scott, and he was the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester until his passing in 2022.