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William Meredith
was born in New York City in 1919, was graduated from Princeton in
1940 and served as a naval aviator during the Second World War and
the Korean Conflict. His first book of poems, LOVE LETTER FROM AN
IMPOSSIBLE LAND, was chosen by Archibald MacLeish, in 1944, for the
Yale Series of Younger Poets; the title poem had been written the
year before, in the Aleutians Islands; SHIPS AND OTHER FIGURES, his
second book of verse, was published in Princeton in 1948. THE OPEN
SEA AND OTHER POEMS (1958), THE WRECK OF THE THRESHER AND OTHER POEMS
(1964), EARTH WALK: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (1970), HAZARD THE PAINTER
(1975), THE CHEER (1980), and PARTIAL ACCOUNTS (1988) were published
by Knopf. POETS OF BULGARIA (1986) was published by Unicorn Press
and EFFORT AT SPEECH, SELECTED POEMS (1994) was published by Orpheus
House, Sofia and Paris. He has translated a number of Bulgarian poets,
and in 1964 translated Guillaume Appollinaire's ALCOOLS: Poems 1898-1913.
PARTIAL ACCOUNTS won the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times
Book award in 1988 and his work has received much recognition in previous
years. William Meredith has won three of Poetry's annual prizes and
a grant from the Loines Award from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, of which he became a member in 1968. He is a Chancellor Emeritus
of the Academy of American Poets where he has served since 1964 and
from 1978 through 1980 he has served as the Consultant to Poetry to
the Library of Congress. In 1980 he was awarded the International
Vaptsarov Prize in Poetry, and in 1984 a senior fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Princeton, the University
of Hawaii, Middlebury College, Breadloaf, and Carnegie-Mellon University,
but has been primarily associated with Connecticut College since 1955.
He retired from Connecticut College in 1984 after a stroke, but continues
to read his work and teach at poetry conferences and colleges across
the United States. He has received honorary doctorates from Carnegie-Mellon
University, Middlebury, and Connecticut Colleges and was honored in
a special tribute by the Academy of American Poetry at the New York
Historical Society in 1989. In 1994 he was presented with the Westport,
Connecticut Lifetime Achievement Award in Literature.
EFFORT AT SPEECH, New and Selected Poems was published by Northwestern
University Press in 1997 and won the National Book Award for Poetry
that year. THE WHITE ISLAND was published in 1998 by E. Niagolova
House, Varna, Bulgaria (Distributed in the United States by Carnegie-Mellon
University Press.) Many awards have followed the publication of his
latest EFFORT AT SPEECH, including a fourth honorary Ph.D. which was
given by the American University in Bulgaria May 10, 1998. On January
9, 1999 he was awarded a fifth Doctoral degree, Honoris Causa, from
the Slavonic University in Sofia, Bulgaria.
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