Paul Muldoon, Lewis Center for the Arts

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

About

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. He moved in 1987 to the United States and joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1990. At Princeton, Muldoon was the Howard G. B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities, a professor of creative writing, Founding Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, and he directed the Princeton Atelier and chaired the Fund for Irish Studies. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College.

Paul Muldoon's main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), Maggot (2010), One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Poems 1968-2014 (2016), and Howdie-Skelp (2021).

Muldoon is the editor of the Paul McCartney boxed, two-volume set, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (2021), illuminating the stories behind 154 of McCartney’s song lyrics. In 2022 Muldoon collaborated on The Castle of Perseverance, which combines his poems with watercolors by Philip Pearlstein.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."

His fifteenth collection of poetry, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, was published by FSG and Faber and Faber in September 2024.

This information is accurate as of their last semester spent teaching.