B. 1969

Born in San Antonio, poet Peter Streckfus earned a BA from the University of Texas-Austin and an MFA from George Mason University. Streckfus’s allusive poems frequently mix historical and imagined references in pursuit of lyric truth. In the Boston Review, Garth Greenwell wrote, “Streckfus abdicates common, worldly logic … his weird metamorphoses, his narrative leaps and gaps seem compelled, like Dickinson’s, by an urge to disclosure matched perfectly with reticence.”
 
Louise Glück selected Streckfus’s debut collection, The Cuckoo (2004), for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Streckfus’s second collection of poetry is Errings (2014). His additional honors include fellowships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and the Peter S. Reed Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. In 2013 he was a Rome Prize Fellow in Literature. His work has been anthologized in Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary American Poets from 1951 to 1977 (2006), Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers +Artists (2008), and Poets on Teaching (2010).
 
Streckfus has taught at Western Connecticut State University and the University of Alabama. He is on faculty in the Creative Writing Program at George Mason University as well as the low-residency MFA at Cedar College. He lives in the Washington D.C. area with his wife, the poet and translator Heather Green.