Frank Bidart

Frank Bidart (born May 27, 1939 in Bakersfield, California) is an American academic and poet.

Biography
In 1957, he began to study at the University of California at Riverside and went on to Harvard, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He began studying with Lowell and Reuben Brower in 1962.

He has taught English at Wellesley College since 1972, including courses such as Modern Poetry. He has also taught at nearby Brandeis University.

Bidart was the 2007 winner of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. His chapbook, Music Like Dirt, later included in the collection Star Dust, is the only chapbook to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

He is openly gay.

Poetry

 * Golden State (1973)
 * The Book of the Body (1977)
 * The Sacrifice (1983)
 * In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (1990)
 * Desire (1997) received the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry; nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award
 * Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books, 2002), the only poetry chapbook ever nominated for a Pulitzer Prize
 * Star Dust (2005), in two sections
 * Watching the Spring Festival (2008), Bidart's first book of lyrics

Other

 * Editor, with David Gewanter, of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (2003)

Awards and honors

 * The Paris Review's first Bernard F. Conners Prize for "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" (1981)
 * Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992) * Wallace Stevens Award (2000)
 * Elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets (2003)
 * Bollingen Prize in American Poetry (2007)
 * Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer's Award
 * Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
 * Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America