David Yezzi

David Yezzi (he/him/his)

Professor

Contact Information

David Yezzi’s latest books are Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life (St. Martin’s Press) and More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems (Measure Press). He is the editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, foreword by J. D. McClatchyAs an actor, he recently performed the roles of King Lear (Baltimore Shakespeare Factory) and Hamlet’s Ghost/Player King (Chesapeake Shakespeare). His verse play Schnauzer (2018), produced by The Baltimore Poets Theater, was published by Exot Books. His libretto for David Conte’s opera Firebird Motel has been widely performed and is available on CD from Arsis. A former director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York, he was a 2022 short-term visiting fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.

In addition to leading graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops, David Yezzi teaches courses in “Lives of the Poets,” on the intersections of poetry and biography in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Anthony Hecht, and others, and “Performing Fiction and Poetry,” which combines literary and theatrical practice to further develop an awareness of literature as a spoken communication.

Black Sea

author
Carnegie Mellon Poetry , 2018

Azores

author
Swallow Press , 2008