Lloyd Schwartz

Lloyd Schwartz is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Poet Laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts (for which he was awarded a 2021 Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets). He is also Contributing Arts Critic for WBUR-FM’s the ARTery and a regular commentator on music and art for NPR’s Fresh Air. For 35 years, he was Classical Music Editor of The Boston Phoenix, for which he won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. He is the author of the poetry collections These People (Wesleyan); Goodnight, Gracie; Cairo Traffic; Little Kisses; and Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems (U of Chicago), and the chapbook Lloyd Schwartz: The Greatest Hits 1973-2000 (Puddinghouses). His theatre piece, These People: Voices for the Stage, was produced by the Poets’ Theatre in 1990. He has edited Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (U of Michigan), Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (Library of America), and Elizabeth Bishop: Prose (FSG, 2011). Three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for writing about music, he has also won grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America (for poetry), the United States Information Agency (for his work on Elizabeth Bishop), and the Amphion Foundation (for his writing on contemporary music). His poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. He has also worked as an actor in live theater (with such actors as Stockard Channing, Tommy Lee Jones, James Woods, Cherry Jones, and Alvin Epstein) and on The Spider’s Web, a National Public Radio program for children.