From 1997 to 2000, Robert Pinsky served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.  During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007);  Jersey Rain (2000);
The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David (Schocken, 2006);  Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002);  The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry Magazine's Oscar Blumenthal prize, the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.  He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.

Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.

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