David Shapiro grew up in Deal, New Jersey. Shapiro acame to poetry early, publishing his first poem in Poetry magazine when he was just sixteen, and his first collection of poems, January (1965), when he was eighteen. Shapiro’s subsequent volumes of poetry include Poems from Deal (1969), A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel (1971), The Page-Turner (1972), Lateness (1977), To an Idea (1983), House (Blown Apart) (1988), After a Lost Original (1994), New and Selected Poems (1965–2006), and In Memory of an Angel (2016). 

Shapiro has been identified with the New York School of poets—he wrote a study of John Ashbery’s poems, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry (1979), and was friends with Kenneth Koch. The author of studies on artists such as Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, and Piet Mondrian, Shapiro has taught at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Princeton University, and the Cooper Union School of Architecture. He was a tenured professor of art history at William Paterson University. Shapiro died at the age of seventy-seven on May 4, 2024. (Bio from Poetry Foundation; Photo credit: artnet.com)