Bruce Bennett

Bio

Bruce Bennett was born in 1940 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He started to write poetry when he was eight. In the 1970s his poems began appearing regularly in magazines and anthologies. He received his AB, AM and PhD from Harvard, and taught English at Oberlin College from 1967-70, where he co-founded and served as an editor of Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. In 1971 he co-founded and served as an editor of Ploughshares while living and writing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1971, he married art historian Bonnie Apgar, and lived in Florence, Italy, for two years. Since 1973, he has taught English and Creative Writing at Wells College in Aurora, New York. During the 1980’s, he was an Associate Editor at Judith Kitchen’s State Street Press. In 1993 he co-founded the Wells College Book Arts Center and Wells College Press, and served as Director until 2001.

He is the author of nine full-length books of poetry and more than twenty poetry chapbooks. His most recent books are Something Like Karma (Clandestine Press, 2009) and Subway Figure (Orchises Press, 2009). His most recent chapbooks are Visitation (FootHills Publishing, 2009) and The Holding Stone (Finishing Line Press, 2010). His New and Selected Poems, Navigating The Distances (Orchises Press), was chosen by Booklist as “One Of The Top Ten Poetry Books Of 1999.” He has reviewed contemporary poetry books in a number of journals and magazines, including The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and Harvard Review. He is currently Professor and Chair of English and Director of Creative Writing at Wells, and also directs the college’s Visiting Writers Series.
TITLES OF BOOKS: Navigating the Distances: Poems New and Selected, ISBN 0-914601-79-8. PUBLISHER: Orchises Press, Roger Lathbury; lathbury@gmu.edu – Orchises Press, P.O. Box 20602, Alexandria, VA, 22320-1602; Subway Figure, ISBN 978-1-932535-21-1. PUBLISHER: Orchises Press, Roger Lathbury; lathbury@gmu.edu – Orchises Press, P.O. Box 20602, Alexandria, VA, 22320-1602. Host should probably order books from publisher.