Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky (born 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator best known for his poetry collections such as Sadness and Happiness (1975), The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 (1996), and At the Foundling Hospital (2016), as well as his translation of Dante's Inferno. Congress. He served three consecutive terms as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000, the first to do so, during which he founded the Favorite Poem Project, and has taught at institutions including Boston University.