Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 1, 1927. In 1948, he graduated from Princeton University. He later received his Master's degree from the University of Rochester. After serving in the United States Navy, he spent several years of his life traveling, including extensive tours of Europe and the Middle East, especially Iran and France. Upon his return to the United States, Kinnell joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) as a field worker and spent much of the 1960s involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Kinnell is the recipient of the 2010 Wallace Stevens Award. His other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has served as poet-in-residence at numerous colleges and universities, including the University of California at Irvine, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Brandeis, and divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007.