B. 1950

Ron Slate was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, and earned an MA in creative writing from Stanford University in 1973. His collections of poetry include The Great Wave (2009) and The Incentive of the Maggot (2005), chosen by poet Robert Pinsky for the Bakeless Poetry Prize and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Susan Barba, reviewing The Incentive of the Maggot in the Boston Review, wrote of Slate’s style, “he chooses words less for their surprise than their precision. And yet Slate is in command of a varied tonal repertoire.” A successful businessman for over two decades, Slate creates work that is often praised for its maturity and depth. According to the poet Gail Mazur, Slate is “at once a realist uneasily inhabiting a staggeringly surreal universe and a sophisticated surrealist moving easily inside the ordinary life of family, corporate work and international travel, and interpreting his disjointed surroundings with gravity and clarity.”

Slate and his daughter Jenny Slate co-wrote and published a memoir, About The House (2016), helping to raise over $250,000 for nonprofit organizations in the USA and abroad.

Slate is a board member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He was a judge for the 2019 PEN America Translation Prize. He has worked as a corporate speechwriter and as vice president of global communications for EMC Corporation. He lives in Aquinnah, Massachusetts.