Long-time faculty member and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon will retire from Princeton University at the end of the 2024-25 academic year.

Paul Muldoon in 2024. Photo credit: Christine Harris

Wearing many hats and making numerous contributions to the University, Muldoon has taught at Princeton since 1990. He holds the title of Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, is a professor of creative writing, was the founding chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts, has directed the Princeton Atelier for many years, and served as chair of the Fund for Irish Studies.

As an internationally renowned poet, Muldoon has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.” Roger Rosenblatt, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Muldoon as “one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems—word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy, and angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.”

Muldoon receives the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry from former Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger. Photo courtesy of The Pulitzer Prizes

Muldoon has published 15 volumes of poems: 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), for which he received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Horse Latitudes (2006); Maggot (2010); One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015); Poems 1968-2014 (2016); Howdie-Skelp (2021); and Joy in Service on Rue Tagore (2024). His work has been translated into over twenty languages.

“While the world knows Paul as one of the most influential poets of our time, we in the LCA also know him as a dedicated professor, mentor, and administrator,” said Judith Hamera, current chair of the Lewis Center. “We are especially grateful to him for the signal role he played in the formation of the Lewis Center for the Arts, for his leadership as our founding chair—a position he held from 2006 until 2012, and for his bold and visionary stewardship of the Atelier program for nearly twenty years.”

Muldoon leads a creative writing workshop for undergraduate students in 2017. Photo credit: Denise Applewhite

Muldoon also has published in the fields of drama, literary criticism, translation, and children’s literature. He has edited both the Faber Anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Faber Book of Beasts, among numerous other collections. His translations into English of Irish poetry include works by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. With his wife, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, he adapted James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” into the play, The Dead, 1904.

Muldoon has taught courses in introductory and advanced poetry, literary translation, and on special topics in poetry since joining the Princeton faculty. He has also taught courses in the Department of English including, most recently, “Modern Irish Poetry.”

“Anyone who has attended his classes or public events will forever remember the openness and generosity of spirit with which he introduces poems, sharing them as if breaking bread with listeners and inviting everyone to the table,” shared his Lewis Center colleagues in a recently posted tribute. “Paul is known as a beloved teacher and a passionate, attentive mentor. Over the years, inspired by his teaching, Paul’s students have published many books of their own.”

Muldoon interviews Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney during the 2011 Princeton Poetry Festival. Photo courtesy Lewis Center for the Arts

Muldoon served as the Director of the Program in Creative Writing from 1993 to 2002. In 1998, he was named the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities.

In 2009, Muldoon launched the biennial Princeton Poetry Festival, bringing the greatest poets from around the world to Princeton for a series of readings, lectures, and panel discussions on the current state of poetry. At the inaugural festival, he explained the event was an effort to “honor [the University’s] relationship with poetry” and make great poetry available to the community beyond Princeton students and professors. That initial audience included area high school students.

At the launch of the Lewis Center for the Arts in 2007 (left to right), Paul Muldoon, former Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman, Toni Morrison, and Peter B. Lewis ’55. By Kevin Birch

Muldoon played a key role in the establishment of the Lewis Center for the Arts and served as its first chair. Originally the University Center for the Performing Arts, Muldoon worked closely with then University President Shirley Tilghman to bring the University’s programs in creative writing, dance, theater, and visual arts together under one academic center, lifting the visibility of the arts and increasing opportunities for students to make the arts a part of their experience at Princeton.

“We’ve come to understand more widely at Princeton,” said Muldoon at the time, “that the arts may be central to the experience here—not necessarily overshadowing any of the other areas that a student might pursue—but that there’s something about the way in which the arts make us understand who we are and what we’re doing that I think has become, particularly under President Tilghman’s leadership, more central to the University’s idea of itself. I’m especially keen to help develop that idea.”

In 2022, Muldoon and Tony Award-winning composer Stew watch students rehearse for the performance of their collaborative rock musical, Athens, Georgia. Photo credit: Jon Sweeney

With a $101 million gift from alumnus Peter B. Lewis, Class of 1955, the Lewis Center was officially launched in 2007 under the banner of “Princeton in the Service of the Imagination,” Muldoon’s riff on Princeton’s informal motto, “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.” During Muldoon’s tenure as chair, the number of courses offered, faculty hired, and students enrolled in classes grew significantly. Under his leadership, planning for the 145,000-square-foot Lewis Arts complex began, a project brought to completion by Muldoon’s successor as chair, Michael Cadden.

In 2004, Muldoon joined his colleague Toni Morrison as co-director of the Princeton Atelier. With Professor Morrison’s transfer to emerita status in 2006, he assumed direction of the program for the next 19 years except for a brief hiatus in which Professor Stacy Wolf led the program. Founded by Morrison in 1994, the Atelier brings together professional artists from different disciplines and Princeton students to create new work in the context of a semester-long course that culminates in the public presentation of that new work. For example, Muldoon and Tony Award-winning composer Stew invited Princeton students to join them in development of a new rock musical in the spring 2022 Atelier course, “Athens, Georgia,” based on the ancient Greek play The Frogs by Aristophanes.

Muldoon in conversation with Paul Simon at Richardson Auditorium in 2015. Photo credit: Denise Applewhite

Through the Atelier, and in other capacities as well, Muldoon tapped his global network of friends, colleagues, and collaborators in the arts, humanities, and other fields to visit Princeton to teach for a semester, present a public lecture, reading, or performance, or conduct a workshop for students. Among the many guests Muldoon hosted over the years, including through his Atelier@Large series, are Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Tom Stoppard, Darryl (Run D.M.C) McDaniels, Lynn Nottage, Joy Harjo, Peter Sellars, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

Muldoon established the Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton in 1998, working for the next 17 years with a committee of colleagues to bring the greatest of Ireland’s writers, artists, musicians, composers, scholars, historians, and intellectuals to Princeton in an annual series of events for the campus and regional community.

Muldoon with Leonard L. Milberg ’53 during the 2013 event “A Man for the Books,” recognizing the Milberg collections of Irish poetry, prose, and drama that made the University a center for Irish studies. Photo credit: Beverly Schaffer for Princeton Alumni Weekly

Muldoon has also brought his experience as a songwriter and musician to his work at Princeton. In addition to poetry, he has written libretti and rock lyrics and is currently a member of the band Rogue Oliphant. In 2013 at the Lewis Center he launched the very popular course, “How to Write a Song,” bringing student writers, composers, and musicians together to work in teams to write new songs every week of the semester. Muldoon team-taught the course with a number of songwriters including Wesley Stace/John Wesley Harding and Bridget Kearney and a series of invited guests, who have included Roseanne Cash, Steve Martin, and Paul McCartney. Muldoon edited the Paul McCartney boxed, two-volume set, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (2021), illuminating the stories behind 154 of McCartney’s song lyrics. He collaborated on a new opera, Olagón, with Music Department faculty member Dan Trueman in 2017 and brought his collaboration with experimental music/contemporary opera composer Kamala Sankaram on the small-scale opera Custom of the Coast to an Atelier course last fall. He has also collaborated with musician Warren Zevon and is the author of The Word on the Street, a collection of rock lyrics written for his former band the Wayside Shrines, and Songs and Sonnets, about the relationship between verse and song.

A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature in 1996. His other awards include the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry 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, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the year 2017 awarded by Queen Elizabeth II. In February 2025 he was elected Saoi of Aosdána, bestowed by President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins for “singular and sustained distinction in the arts.” In 2008, he received Princeton’s Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities.

Paul Muldoon (center) listens to student work during a session of the “How to Write a Song” course co-taught in 2013 by Muldoon and writer/musician John Wesley Harding/Wesley Stace). Photo credit: Denise Applewhite

Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen’s University of Belfast, where he met the future Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and became one of the youngest members of the legendary Belfast Group of poets, whose members would go on to define contemporary Irish poetry. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a period marked by the bitterest years of The Troubles. After leaving the BBC, he taught at the University of East Anglia and at Cambridge University. In 1987, Muldoon emigrated to the United States, where he taught creative writing at several universities, including Berkeley and Columbia. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. From 2007 to 2017 he served as Poetry Editor of The New Yorker, and he served as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2022 to 2025. He is a trustee of PEN America.

A recent feature-length documentary film about Muldoon presents the story of his life through poems and performances of his song lyrics, while chronicling his beginnings as a radio producer with the BBC in Belfast to his position at Princeton. The film features Paul Simon, Liam Neeson, PJ Harvey, Bono, Ruth Negga, Paul Brady, and Iarla Ó Lionáird.

The tribute by his Lewis Center colleagues concludes with, “Here at Princeton, Paul has made his mark as an influential professor, mentor, and administrator, a maestro who knows that poetry is something that is necessary for all of us and is generous enough to share it with everyone he meets.”

As of July 1, Muldoon will move to emeritus status at Princeton.