Frank Bidart

Bidart is a native of California and considered a career in acting or directing when he was young.[1] In 1957, he began to study at the University of California at Riverside, where he was introduced to writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and started to look at poetry as a career path. He then went on to Harvard, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He began studying with Lowell and Reuben Brower in 1962.[2]

He has been an English professor at Wellesley College since 1972, and has taught at nearby Brandeis University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he is gay.[3][4] In his early work, he was noted for his dramatic monologue poems like "Ellen West," which Bidart wrote from the point of view of a woman with an eating disorder, and "Herbert White," which he wrote from the point of view of a psychopath. He has also written openly about his family in the style of confessional poetry.

He co-edited the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell which was published in 2003 after years of working on the book's voluminous footnotes with his co-editor David Gewanter.[5]

Bidart was the 2007 winner of Yale University's Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. His chapbook, Music Like Dirt, later included in the collection Star Dust, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His 2013 book Metaphysical Dog was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.[6]

He currently maintains a strong working relationship with actor and fellow poet James Franco, with whom he collaborated during the making of Franco's short film "Herbert White" (2010), based on Bidart's poem of the same name.[7]

In 2017, Bidart received the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016.[8]

He was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016.

• 1981 The Paris Review's first Bernard F. Conners Prize for "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky"
• 1991 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writers' Award[9]
• 1992 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[10]
• 1995 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Poetry given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters[11]
• 1997 Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America
• 1998 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by Library of Congress
• 2000 Wallace Stevens Award of The Academy of American Poets; subsequently elected a Chancellor of the Academy (2003)
• 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry[12]
• 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Poetry), winner for Metaphysical Dog[13][14][15]
• 2013 National Book Award (Poetry), finalist for Metaphysical Dog[16][17]
• 2014 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry[18][19][20]
• 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award
• 2017 National Book Award in Poetry
• 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

• On Frank Bidart: Fastening the voice to the page (edited by Liam Rector & Tree Swenson). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

• Frank Bidart at FSG
• Famous Poets and Poems Web site
• Poetry Foundation
• Bookslut blog interview with Bidart
• Discussion of Bidart's "Golden State" and Diachronicity Archived 2011-04-23 at the Wayback Machine