Poet, translator, and editor Brian Henry earned his BA at the College of William & Mary and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His collections of poetry include Astronaut (2000), American Incident (2002), Graft (2003), Quarantine (2006), In the Unlikely Event of a Water (2007), The Stripping Point (2007), Wings Without Birds (2010), Lessness (2011), Doppelgänger (2011). Brother No One (2013), Static & Snow (2015) and Permanent State (2020). An advocate for Slovenian poets and poetry, he has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (2008) and Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things (2010), Above the Sky Beneath the Earth (2019), The Book of Bodies (2022) and Burning Tongues: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2022). His translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things won both the Best Translated Book Award and AATSEEL’s Best Literary Translation into English Award, and his translation of Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers received a 2011 Howard Foundation fellowship. He also received translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for books by Šteger, one for his collection of lyric essays, Berlin, the other for Burning Tongues. He is currently editing and translating a final comprehensive volume of Selected Poems by Tomaž Šalamun for Milkweed Editions.
His prose book Things Are Completely Simple: Poetry and Translation was published by Parlor Press in 2021. He edited the collection of essays On James Tate (2004), and co-edited the magazine Verse with Andrew Zawacki from 1995 to 2018. Henry and Zawacki also coedited The Verse Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language, Craft & Culture (2005).
Henry’s poems, essays, and translations have been published widely in journals such as American Poetry Review, Jacket, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Poetry and Poetry Review. He has received fellowships for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Slovenian Ministry of Culture, and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and for poetry criticism and editing from the Fulbright program. His honours and awards include a Distinguished Educator Award, a Cecil B. Hemley Memorial Award, an Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and a George Bogin Memorial Award. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Richmond.
