Timothy Steele

Timothy Steele is a United States poet and academic. Born in Burlington, Vermont in 1948, he is a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. Some of Steele's early verse appeared in X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures in the early seventies. He went on to become a figure in the New Formalism movement, and was an original faculty member of the West Chester University Poetry Conference on Form and Narrative in Poetry. He received the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award in 2004.

Steele is the author of five books of poetry, among them, Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986). His poetry is more strictly "formal" than the work of most fellow New Formalists in that he rarely uses inexact rhymes or metrical substitutions, and is sparing in his use of enjambment. He is also the author of two books on prosody: Missing Measures, a history and evaluation of modern free verse; and All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing, an introduction to English versification.