Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker has been publishing poetry since the 1970s. Her first book, Presentation Piece, won the National Book Award in 1975. Her many collections of poems include Selected Poems and Winter Numbers (W W Norton, 1994), the latter winning both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, Desesperanto (W W Norton, 2003), and First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979 (also 2003). Her latest collection is Names (W W Norton, 2009).

Marilyn Hacker has received numerous awards and honours, including the National Book Award, the Bernard F Conners Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. In February 2012 she was awarded the International Argana Prize for Poetry by the House of Poetry in Morocco. Previous winners of the Argana prize have included the Chinese poet Bei Dao, Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine), Saadi Youssef (Iraq) and Taher Ben Jelloun (Morocco)

Marilyn Hacker is a prolific translator of French poetry and some her translations are: Claire Malroux’s A Long-Gone Sun, Sheep Meadow Press, 2000 and Birds and Bison, also by Claire Malroux, Sheep Meadow Press 2004. She has translated four works of Vénus Khoury-Ghata – Here There Was Once a Country (2001) and She Says (2003), House on the Edge of Tears (2004) and Nettles (2008), all published by Graywolf Press, USA. She has also translated poetry by Amina Saïd, Rachida al-Madani, Habib Tengour and Tahar Bekri.

She lives in New York and Paris, and teaches at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a contributing editor of Banipal. In 2008, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. 

For more information, click here for the Academy of American Poets.