Chard DeNiord

Chard deNiord earned a BA in religious studies from Lynchburg College, a Masters of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A cofounder of the New England College MFA program in poetry, he is the author of the poetry collections Asleep in the Fire (1990), Sharp Golden Thorn (2003), Night Mowing (2005), The Double Truth (2011), and At the Sleep Clinic (2020). His book Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs (2011) is a collection of interviews with American poets, including Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Jack Gilbert, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, and Ruth Stone. His second collection of interviews with poets is I Would Lie to You if I Could: Interviews with Ten American Poets (2018).

DeNiord has been a Poetry Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Allan Collins Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and his poems have been included in the anthologies Pushcart Prize XXII (1998), Best American Poetry (1999), Best of the Prose Poem (2000), American Religious Poems (2006), and American Poetry Now (2007).

A teacher at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, deNiord lives in Putney, Vermont. In late 2015, he was named poet laureate of Vermont.