William Baer

William Baer is the author of 25 books, including The Unfortunates, recipient of the T.S. Eliot Award; “Bocage” and Other Sonnets, recipient of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize; Formal Salutations: New & Selected Poems; and four other collections of poetry. His other books include Luís de Camões: Selected Sonnets, Conversations with Derek Walcott, New Jersey Noir, Times Square and Other Stories, and Classic American Films: Conversations with the Screenwriters. Baer has received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Fulbright and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

William Baer grew up in the Bronx and Wayne, New Jersey. He is a graduate of Rutgers University, New York University, the University of South Carolina (where his dissertation was directed by James Dickey), the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and USC’s Graduate School of Cinema, where he received the Jack Nicholson Screenwriting Award. He was also the founding editor of The Formalist: A Journal of Metrical Poetry, and the founding director of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Series, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.