2011: Marilyn Hacker (Poet)

Poet, Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve collections of poems, a book of critical essays, and eleven collections of poetry translated from the French. Her most recent books are Names (W. W. Norton, 2009), Essays on Departure, (Carcanet Press, U.K. 2006) and Desesperanto (W.W.Norton, 2003), and the essay collection Unauthorized Voices (University of Michigan Press, 2010).

Hacker’s first collection of poems, Presentation Piece, was published by the Viking Press in 1974. It was both the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and the recipient of the National Book Award. It was followed by Separations (Alfred A. Knopf, 197) and Taking Notice (Knopf, 1980) andAssumptions (Knopf, 1985). In 1986, Hacker published Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons(Arbor House), a novel-like narrative of a lesbian relationship told through sonnets. In 1990, she published Going Back to the River (Vintage Books), for which she received a Lambda Literary Award. Hacker’s 1996 collection, Winter Numbers (W. W. Norton and Company), details the loss of friends to AIDS and cancer, and explores her own struggle with breast cancer. The collection won both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Her Selected Poems: 1965-1990 received the 1996 Poets’ Prize. Her next book, Squares and Courtyards (Norton, 2001) received the Audre Lorde Award of the Publishing Triangle.

Marilyn Hacker was editor of the feminist literary magazine 13th Moon in the 1980s, and was editor of the literary quarterly The Kenyon Review from 1990 through 1994. She is currently co-editor of the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series, and on the editorial board of the French literary magazineSiècle 21.

Hacker began publishing translations in 1996 with Claire Malroux’s Edge (Wake Forest University Press). Other French and Francophone poets she has translated include Guy Goffette, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Hédi Kaddour. She received the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux).

Marilyn Hacker currently lives in Paris. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2008. She received the PEN Voelcker Award for the totality of her own work in 2010. (From the John Cabot University Website)

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