The Ruins Lesson
Ms. Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she also directs the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Her poetry collections include Red Rover; Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Forest; The Hive; and Yellow Stars and Ice. She has written extensively about the creative act of making poetry and the history of literary criticism. Among her prose works are The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making; The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won both the Christian Gauss Award in Literary Criticism and the Truman Capote Award for Criticism; Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation; On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection; and Nonsense.
Ms. Stewart has translated Alda Merini, Scipione, Laudomia Bonanni, and Milo De Angelis from the Italian; Euripides’ Andromache from the Greek; and selected poems by Marcel Proust from the French. She often collaborates with composers and artists. “Songs for Adam,” a cycle on her poems composed by James Primosch, premiered with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2009. Stewart has also written a series of songs with the jazz clarinetist and composer Ben Goldberg, and her poems have been on exhibition with paintings by Sandro Chia in Capalbio, Italy.
Ms. Stewart has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pew Foundation in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace Foundation. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2009 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2014 she will be a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.