Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. He made his living mostly from teaching from 1949 to 2005, in France, Iran and Australia as well as at colleges and universities across America. He was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University for many years, and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. In 1982 his Selected Poems won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. An updated and expanded edition was published as Selected Poems by Bloodaxe in Britain in 2001. He also published several translations, including books by Goll, Lorca, Rilke and Villon, and Yves Bonnefoy’s On the Motion and Immobility of Douve in the Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets series (1992). His final collection, Strong Is Your Hold, published with an audio CD in 2007 by Bloodaxe, includes his long poem 'When the Towers Fell', a requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 in direct view of his New York apartment. He died in 2014.
