A U.S. Poet Laureate in Conversation

Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in publications such as New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares. His poetry is represented in dozens of anthologies. Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, the collection Nouns & Verbs (Ecco) brings together thirty-five years of McGrath’s writing. He gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work—lyric poems, prose poems, and a personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers. Nothing is too large or small to remain untouched by McGrath’s voracious intellect and deep empathy as he investigates the enduring human experiences of love and loss. In a starred review, Booklist noted that “McGrath’s absorbing, amusing, and reflective traveling music entices us on the road yet again.”

Robert Hass‘ books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, Time and Materials, Sun Under Wood, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide, which was selected for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation. His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. In Summer Snow (Ecco), his first collection of poems since 2010, Robert Hass’ trademark careful attention to the natural world, subtle humor, and the wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display. Addressing subjects including the poignancy of loss, the beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities, expansive intellect, and tremendous readability in one of his most ambitious and formally brilliant collections to date. The New Yorker noted that “Hass personalizes everything, warms everything up. He’s an open book; but he’s also someone whom readers should, in every sense of the phrase, keep their eye on.”