Patrick Donnelly

PATRICK DONNELLY is the author of five books of poetry, most recently WILLOW HAMMER, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2025. About Donnelly, Gregory Orr wrote “everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts.  Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award. Donnelly regards his writing as “activist” in the sense that it insists on the subtle links between body and spirit, treats same-sex love as equivalent to all other love and desire, and interrogates topics like the AIDS epidemic with lyric strategies.