Faculty

Profile

Robert Polito's most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God and Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Hollywood & God was chosen by Barnes and Noble as one of the top five poetry books of 2010. Polito received a National Book Critics Circle Award for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. He is also the author of the poetry collection Doubles, as well as A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, and a study of Byron's poetry. His poems and reviews, criticism, and essays on literature, film, and popular music have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Harpers, The Believer, Bookforum, The Poetry Foundation website, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, and Best American Film Writing. For nearly a decade, he judged the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, choosing some celebrated and now-canonical books by Leslie Jamison, Eula Biss, Ander Monson, Kevin Young, Terese Svoboda, Margaret Lazarus Dean, and Kate Braverman. The founding director of The New School's Creative Writing Program and the Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy, he served as President of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, before returning to New York. He is working on a new collection of poems, as well as a pair of nonfiction books (noir; Bob Dylan).