James Richardson

Professor of English and Creative Writing

James Richardson was born January 1, 1950, grew up in Garden City, New York and was educated at Princeton (A.B summa cum laude 1971) and Virginia (Ph.D. 1975). In 1980 he returned to Princeton, where he is now Professor of English & Creative Writing, teaching beginning and advanced poetry workshops, English 200: Poetry, English 332: 19th-Century Poetry, English 350: Contemporary Poetry, and English 563: Lyric Poetry. He has also taught for Princeton’s Teachers as Scholars Program, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway, Columbia and Harvard.

James Richardson’s main collections are Reservations (1977), Second Guesses (1984), As If (1992), How Things Are (2000), the “cult favorite” Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2001), and Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of two critical studies, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity (1977) and Vanishing Lives: Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne and Yeats (1988).

Recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Robert H. Winner, Cecil Hemley and Emily Dickinson Awards of the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the NEH and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Richardson has recent poems and aphorisms in Slate, The New Yorker, Science News, Paris Review, Best American Poetry 2001 and 2005, Harold Bloom’s American Religious Poems, David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: Poe to the Present and Geary’s Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, and recent talks and essays on Bishop, Larkin, Merrill, Browning, Van Duyn, proverbs and aphorisms, “dead lady poems,” and how the brain dreams and reads. His favorite reading, aside from poetry, is science and science fiction. When he is not working, and sometimes when he is, he is likely to be drifting and gazing, listening to music or the Yankees, walking immense distances, or all of the above.