Dan Chiasson (; born May 9, 1971Dan Chiasson at poets.org.) is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country's most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature and Chair of the English Department at Wellesley College.
Chiasson is the author of seven books: The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), The Math Campers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), and Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People's Politician.
Bernie for Burlington is a both "biography of Bernie's political rise" and a memoir of what Chiasson calls "a very unusual American experiment, a modern city run by a charismatic socialist and his smart, young administration, during the eight years when Ronald Reagan was in the White House." Chiasson added "I'm actually one of the outcomes of the experiment, and so is my book, looking back on the transformation of Burlington and the thrilling rise of Bernie and his ideas." Nicholson Baker called it "a book we need right now," a "big, lovingly-woven, Whitmanesque wicker work of grievances and glories, home truths and triumphs." Robert Pinsky praised its "wild variety of stories, voices and characters," and added "Dan Chiasson of Burlington, Vermont and American poetry is a masterful narrator."
Life Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont. He grew up in the city of Burlington as the only child of his single mother. He attended Catholic schools, Mater Christi School and Rice Memorial High School, from which he graduated in 1989. He graduated summa cum laude in Classics and English from Amherst College"Poet, Critic and Editor Dan Chiasson '93", Amherst College, 2009. (1993), and from Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in English and was awarded the Whiting Foundation Award in the Humanities.
In addition to teaching at Wellesley, Chiasson has been affiliated with Boston University's Master of Fine Arts program, with NYU's program in Paris, France, and with the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Environmental Conference in Ripton, Vermont. He was a 2017 James Merrill House Fellow in Stonington, CT. He lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.
Chiasson is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He was the poetry editor (with Meghan O'Rourke), and later advisory editor, of the Paris Review."Msthead", The Paris Review. His poems have been translated into many languages, including German by Jan Wagner. His Natural History was published as Naturgeschichte at Luxbooks, a publishing house focused on American poetry in bilingual editions. In the UK, he is published by Bloodaxe Books.
He is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College."About The Common".
Honors and awards 2008 Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry "Wellesley's Dan Chiasson Is Named a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow", Wellesley College, April 9, 2008. 2004 Whiting Award
Bibliography See also links in the External links section below.
Poetry Collections
Anthologies
List of poems TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collectedThe anatomy of melancholy2001Nocturne2001From 'The Names of 1,001 Strangers'2017Obituary2014Self2000Swifts2008
History
Criticism
Reviews
Online version is titled "Poetry of a childhood lost". Reviews Online version is titled "The illness and insight of Robert Lowell". Online version is titled "The great American poet of daily chores". Online version is titled "Shane McRae's poems to America". Online version is titled "The bittersweet poetry of 'Lima :: Limón'". Online version is titled "Tommy Pico filibusters mortality with poetry". Online version is titled "Inside Bernadette Mayer's time capsule". Online version is titled "What the Bolinas poets built". ——————— Notes
References
External links Search for Chiasson's work in The New Yorker Search for Chiasson's work in The New York Review of Books Search for Chiasson's work in The Paris Review Profile at The Whiting Foundation Dan Chiasson interviewed by Christopher Lydon, "Whose Words These Are", Radio Open Source, May 27, 2010 "Amherst Poets Dream Date: Interview with Dan Chiasson" by Josh Jacobs, September 2011