16 Facts About Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky was the first United States Poet Laureate to serve three terms.

Robert Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Sylvia and Milford Simon Robert Pinsky, an optician.

Robert Pinsky was a student of Francis Fergusson and Paul Fussell at Rutgers and Yvor Winters at Stanford.

Robert Pinsky married Ellen Jane Bailey, a clinical psychologist, in 1961.

Robert Pinsky taught at Wellesley College and at the University of California at Berkeley, and since 1989 has lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.

Early on, Robert Pinsky was inspired by the flow and tension of jazz and the excitement that it made him feel.

Robert Pinsky has acknowledged that his poetry would change somewhat depending on the particular subjectivity of each reader.

Robert Pinsky received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974, and in 1997 he was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress; he was the first poet to be named to three terms.

Robert Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry has a strong presence in the American culture.

The Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, DC commissioned Robert Pinsky to write a free adaptation of Friederich Schiller's drama Wallenstein.

Robert Pinsky wrote the libretto for Death and the Powers, an opera by composer Tod Machover.

Robert Pinsky is the author of the interactive fiction game Mindwheel developed by Synapse Software and released by Broderbund.

Robert Pinsky guest-starred in an episode of the animated sitcom The Simpsons TV show, "Little Girl in the Big Ten", and appeared on The Colbert Report in April, 2007, as the judge of a "Meta-Free-Phor-All" between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn.

Robert Pinsky served as editor of the 25th anniversary volume of The Best of American Poetry anthologies called The Best of the Best of American Poetry, and is the former poetry editor of Slate.

Robert Pinsky edited Singing School, The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling and The Book of Poetry for Hard Times.

Robert Pinsky has received honorary doctorates from numerous institutions such as Northwestern University, Binghamton University, the University of Michigan, Lake Forest College, Emerson College, Southern New Hampshire University University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Merrimack College.