from a photograph by C.H.Traub
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John Frederick Nims was born in Michigan in 1913 and took a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He taught and gave workshops on poetry at several N. American universities and was a visiting professor at the universities of Florence and Madrid. He is the author of eight books of poetry, that brought him awards from the National Foundation of Arts and Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Brandeis University, which awarded him its Creative Arts Citation in Poetry. He was the Phi Beta Kappa poet at the College of William & Mary and at Harvard University. He also published several books of translations, and edited the Harper Anthology of Poetry. Several times on the staff of Poetry (Chicago), he was its editor from 1978 to 1984. In 1982 he was awarded the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets; in 1986 a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry; and in 1971 the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. He died in 1999. |