Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Literature at American University in Washington, DC, where he taught from 1971 until 2003. His third collection of poems, The Flying Change, received the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; his first two, The Horse Show at Midnight (1966) and An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards (1975), were reissued in one volume in 1992. A fourth collection of poems, Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996, appeared in the fall of 1996, and his collection of clerihews, Brief Candles, appeared in 2000. His translations from Bulgarian, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Russian have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, as well as two collections by the Bulgarian poet Vladimir Levchev, the most recent being Black Book of the Endangered Species (Word Works, 1999). He has also published translations from Greek and Roman classical drama; his translation of Sophocles’ Electra appeared (spring 1998) in the Sophocles, 1 volume of the Penn Greek Drama series. He has received Fellowships in Creative Writing for the National Endowment for the Arts (1978 and 1986), a Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980-81), the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1984), the Golden Crane Award of the Washington Chapter of the American Literary Translators Association (1989), the Michael Braude Prize for Light Verse from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2002), and the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry (2004). He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.