Phillip Lopate

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 16, 1943, Philip Lopate received a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and a Ph.D. at Union Graduate School. His most recent book of poetry, At the End of the Day (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010), brings together the majority of his poems, most of which were written during the early years of his career as a writer. 

His other books of poetry include The Daily Round (Sun, 1976) and The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun, 1972). He is also the author of numerous essay collections, including Portrait Inside My Head (Free Press, 2013); To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (Free Press, 2013); Notes on Sontag (Princeton University Press, 2009); Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003); and Portrait of My Body (Anchor, 1996), which was a finalist for the PEN Spielvogel-Diamonston Award. 

He has also written the novels Two Marriages (Other Press, 2008) and The Rug Merchant (Penguin Books, 1987). Of his work, the poet Marie Ponsot writes, “The pleasures of Lopate’s poems are urban and urbane. He takes notice, and he reports he has a heart. And more: he stirs in us literature’s ungovernable alchemic hope, as his truth-saying transforms his anecdotes and precipitates poems.”

Among his many awards are grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Before holding the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, Lopate taught at Fordham, the University of Houston, New York University, and Bennington College. He currently lives in New York City, where he is the director of the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University.