Rosanna Phelps Warren (born July 27, 1953) is an American poet and scholar.
Biography Warren is the daughter of poet, novelist, literary critic and Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren and writer Eleanor Clark. She graduated from Yale University, where she was a member of Manuscript Society, in 1976, with a degree in painting, and then in 1980 received an M.A. from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She served as the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities and a university professor at Boston University until 2012. From 2012 until her retirement, Warren was the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Warren's first collection of poetry, Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984), received generally favorable notice in a review in The New York Times. Her next collection, Stained Glass, won the Lamont Poetry Prize for the best second volume published in the U. S. in 1993; in his review, Jonathan Aaron described these poems "tough-minded, beautifully crafted meditations". Warren was awarded the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching at Boston University in 2004. She held a Lannan Foundation Marfa residency in 2005.
In the 2008–09 academic year, Warren was a fellow of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Family On December 21, 1981, Warren married Stephen Scully, but is now divorced. She has two daughters. Her younger daughter, Chiara Scully, graduated from Yale University and is a psychiatric social worker whose poetry has been published in the Seneca Review and The New Republic. Her elder daughter, Katherine Scully Porter, also graduated from Yale University and is a lawyer. Warren has two grandchildren, Adelaide and Lachlan Porter.
Awards Warren's other awards include several Pushcart Prizes, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit in Poetry, the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize (1993), the Sara Teasdale Award in Poetry (2011), a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2022, the David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize from Suffolk University. In 1990 she served as poet in residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. She is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, and The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In spring of 2006 she received a Berlin Prize to fund half a year of study and work at the American Academy in Berlin.
Bibliography
Poetry Collections
List of poems TitleYearFirst publishedCoots2026”Coots”. The New Yorker. March 23, 2026.Cirrus2025”Cirrus”. The New Yorker. April 14, 2025.Snow2024”Snow”. The New Yorker. December 16, 2024.A New Year2023In a Strange Land2023Small Dead Snake2022Soseki's Shrine2022Inscription2022Number Theory2021From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine2021Intimate Letters2021Interior at Petworth: From Turner2021For Chiara2019Cotillion Photo2016The Twelfth Day2009Romanesque2008A Kosmos2007Palaces2007For Trakl2003Lake2002Invitation au Voyage: Baltimore2002
Criticism “Ghosting: Laura Riding and Gertrude Stein”. The Hopkins Review, Summer 2025, vol. 18, n. 3, pp. 94-111.
Translations Translator with Stephen Scully, The Suppliants (Euripides)
Non-fiction
References
External links Official Website: rosannawarren.com Boston University page Biography at poets.org Interview at The Kenyon Review Rosanna Warren, Ploughshares, the literary journal Audio: Rosanna Warren reads 'Simile' from Departure Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago Who Speaks for the Negro Vanderbilt documentary website