James Richardson, Lewis Center for the Arts

Professor of Creative Writing, Emeritus

Photo courtesy James Richardson

About

James Richardson's most recent collection, For Now, was published in the spring of 2020. His other collections of poems, aphorisms, microlyrics and ten-second essays include During, which was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola prize; By the Numbers, a National Book Award finalist and a Publishers Weekly "Best Book of 2010"; Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays; How Things Are; As If; Second Guesses; and Reservations. He is also the author of two critical studies, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity and Vanishing Lives: Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne and Yeats.

The recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Robert H. Winner, Cecil Hemley, and Emily Dickinson Awards of the Poetry Society of America, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, Richardson has recent work in The New Yorker, The Nation, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Narrative, American Poetry Review, Great American Prose Poems: Poe to the Present, Geary’s Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, Short Flights, Short Circuits: Aphorisms, Fragments and Literary Anomalies and several editions of The Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthology.

Richardson graduated from Princeton in 1971 and joined the Creative Writing faculty in 1980. He teaches beginning and advanced poetry workshops, as well as "All the Moves: Prosody" and "Life is Short, Art is Really Short," a workshop in tiny forms. In May 2021, Richardson received a President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.