Piotr Sommer was born in 1948. He has published ten books of poetry in Polish; a selected poems, Po ciemku też, 2013 (Also in the Dark); many translations (John Ashbery, John Berryman, Bertolt Brecht, John Cage, D.J. Enright, Seamus Heaney, Jenny Holzer, Kenneth Koch, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, Charles Reznikoff, James Schuyler); two books of essays on poetry and translation: Smak detalu, 2015 (A Taste for Detail), and Po stykach, 2005 (Lines of Contact); as well as Ucieczka w bok: pytania i odpowiedzi, 2016 (Escaping on the Side: Questions and Answers), a volume of interviews with him. He has also published two poetry books for children.
His editorial bibliography includes several anthologies of Polish poetry and essays, the most recent being O nich tutaj: książka o języku i przekładzie, 2016 (About Them Over Here: a Book on Language and Translation) which collects the best essays published in Literatura na Świecie (Literature in the World), a monthly devoted to translations of foreign writing into Polish, which he’s been directing since 1994.
He has taught poetry in several American universities, and his poems have been translated into many languages. Two of the English collections – Things to Translate (1991) and Continued (2005) – were published by Bloodaxe. Trias Chapbook series brought out Overdoing It (2013).
