J. D. McClatchy
Author

J. D. McClatchy is the author of five collections of poems and essays collected in two volumes, one of which received the Melville Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has edited several books, among them the acclaimed series The Voice of the Poet for Random House AudioBooks. He is also the editor of the upcoming Library of America edition of Thornton Wilder's works. His poetry and essays appear regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and many other magazines.

McClatchy has taught at Princeton, Columbia, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins, and is currently professor of English at Yale. Since 1991, he has served as editor of The Yale Review. He has written libretti for William Schuman's A Question of Taste, for Francis Thorne's Mario and the Magician, for Bruce Saylor's Orpheus Descending, and Tobias Picker's Emmeline. He has recently completed, with Thomas Meehan, a libretto of Lorin Maazel's 1984, which premiered this year at Covent Garden, and is at work on new projects with composers Elliot Goldenthal and Lowell Liebermann.

He is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among other honors, he has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A 1991 award citation states, "McClatchy writes with an authentic blend of cognitive force and savage emotional intensity. His complex sense of our historical overdetermination is complemented by his concern for adjusting the balance between his own poems and tradition. It may be that no more eloquent poet will emerge in his American generation."

[biography courtesy of Indiana University Jacobs School of Music]

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