Stephen Yenser

Stephen Yenser is an American poet, critic, and editor. He is the author of the poetry collections: Stone Fruit (2016), Blue Guide (2006), and The Fire in All Things (1993). A winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, he has also received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry and the Bernard F. Connors Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review. His critical work includes Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell (1975) and The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987), as well as the essay collection A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large (2002). With the poet J. D. McClatchy, he co-edited James Merrill’s Collected Poems (2002), Collected Novels and Plays of James Merrill (2003), and The Changing Light at Sandover (2006). Yenser is a distinguished professor emeritus and former director of creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and curates the Hammer Poetry Readings at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.