The Academy of American Poets announced on December 14 the election of Lyn Hejinian, Sharon Olds, and Carl Phillips to its board of chancellors. They were chosen by current chancellors Frank Bidart, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Susan Howe, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Pinsky, Kay Ryan, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, James Tate, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and C. K. Williams.
Hejinian's books of poetry include The Fatalist (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), Happily (Post-Apollo Press, 2000), The Cold of Poetry (Sun and Moon Press, 1994), The Cell (Sun and Moon Press, 1992), and My Life (Sun and Moon Press, 1987). She lives in Berkeley, California.
Olds is the author of eight poetry collections, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984) and The Father (Knopf, 1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She teaches in New York University’s graduate creative writing program.
Phillips's most recent book of poetry is Riding Westward (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986–2006 is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next year. He is a professor of African and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the creative writing program.
The Academy’s board of chancellors was established in 1946. Former chancellors have included W. H. Auden, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, and James Merrill, among others.
