Robert Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and attended Rutgers and Stanford, where he held a Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing. He has taught classes in poetry at Wellesley, Berkeley, and currently at Boston University.

Among his awards are the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His translation The Inferno of Dante was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award. From 1997 to 2000 he was the U.S. Poet Laureate.

His books include The Want Bone, The Figured Wheel: Collected Poems 1966-1996, and Jersey Rain. His Tanner Lectures at Princeton University were published as Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry.

About First Things to Hand:

"Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions. Like the Elizabethans he is, in his practice, a tinkerer: restless, daring, endlessly curious; these qualities have produced an art whose scope and complexity and grandeur are rarely equaled by any of his contemporaries."
—Louise Glück