Winter 1996

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He is author or co-author of more than twenty books, most recently a collection of poetry, The Ha-Ha (LSU, 2003), and a volume of essays, What Is a Book? (Georgia, 2002). His work appears frequently in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and was recently awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

Charles Simic (1938 – 2023), was the US poet laureate from 2007 to 2008. He has written more than twenty poetry collections, including Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (Farber and Farber, 2004), winner of the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; Walking the Black Cat (Harcourt, 1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The World Doesn’t End (Harcourt, 1990), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Simic was chosen to receive the American Academy of Poets Fellowship in 1998 and was elected chancellor in 2000. His numerous other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was also the recipient of the 2011 Frost Medal, which is presented annually for “lifetime achievement in poetry.”