Karl Kirchwey

B. 1956
Black and white headshot of poet Karl Kirchwey.
Nancy Crampton

Poet and translator Karl Kirchwey is the author of several collections, including Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems (TriQuarterly, 2017); The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose (Putnam, 2007); The Engrafted Word (Henry Holt and Company, 1998), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and A Wandering Island (Princeton University Press, 1990), winner of a Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His verse play “Airedales and Cipher,” based on Euripides’ “Alcestis,” won a Paris Review Prize for Poetic Drama.

“Art is the medium by which Kirchwey’s art most often reifies the past—an undertaking of moral gravity, since so much of what he finds is perennial cruelty and violence. Yet what time and again emerges . . . is the poet’s own tenderheartedness,” observed poet Mary Jo Salter in a review of The Engrafted Word for The New York Times.

Kirchwey translated the first complete collection in English of Paul Verlain’s Poems Under Saturn. His poems and translations have been published in The KGB Bar Book of Poems (Harper Perennial, 2000), The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997 (Scribner, 1998), Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (University of Texas Press, 1996), and Twentieth Century Poems on the Gospels: An Anthology (1996).

Kirchwey has won a Rome Prize and a Cato Prize for Poetry as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kirchwey was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and earned degrees in English literature from Yale College (BA) and Columbia University (MA). Kirchwey was the director of the 92nd street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center from 1987 to 2000 and was the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. Kirchwey has taught at Columbia, Yale, Wesleyan, Smith College, and Bryn Mawr College, where he won a Rosalind Schwartz Teaching Award. He teaches in Boston University’s creative writing MFA program, which he directed from 2014 to 2016.