John Freeman

Biography

John Freeman is the author of Dictionary of the Undoing (FSG, 2019) and several other books, including The Park (Copper Canyon, 2020), and There’s a Revolution Outside My Life (Vintage, 2021), coedited with Tracy K Smith. The founder of the literary annual Freeman’s, he is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. His latest books are The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story (Penguin, 2021), and Wind, Trees (Copper Canyon, 2022), a collection of poems. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

See Work

POETRY / Fall 2022

Colors

By John Freeman

Thirty miles south of Dallas the air smells of ozone and water. Thunderheads on the horizon in shades of indigo.

POETRY / Spring 2020

The Gargantuan Arm

By John Freeman

Let us remember liberty was not popular,
six years it took Laboulaye to convince
Bartholdi a gigantic statue was 
what New York harbor needed. Eleven
years later

POETRY / Spring 2020

Song of the Song

By John Freeman

I wish we were living
a story of desire, but
I don’t feel Odysseus 
beating out his tale
of longing at the oars

POETRY / Spring 2020

Weight

By John Freeman

What if each time
you caused pain
a small, round stone
was put in your pocket
pebbles for inducing
self-doubt

POETRY / Summer 2014

Witness This

By John Freeman

Every April we unsheathed sofa cushions from their glassy wrappers,
perched tea on our laps, and became an audience for his four-decade

POETRY / Summer 2014

Return

By John Freeman

I went back to the city
we visited, to
the restaurant that

CRITICISM / Spring 2014

Truths, Slightly Arranged: John Updike’s Uninhibited Fiction

By John Freeman

In 1956 Updike was just twenty-​three years old, but he had already embarked on one of the longest dominant careers in American letters. The young Pennsylvanian, with his “towers of ambition” that “rose, crystalline, within me,” would...
CRITICISM / Fall 2013

W. S. Merwin, the Eternal Apprentice

By John Freeman

Merwin’s awesome range, intensity, and feral strangeness are evident in a new two-volume Library of America edition, beautifully edited by J. D. McClatchy. Nearly 1,500 pages in all, it represents an oeuvre so large as to make Robert Lowell...