Jay Parini

Jay Parini (born 1948) is an American writer and academic. He is known for novels and poetry, biography and criticism.

He was born in Pittston, Pennsylvania, and brought up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Lafayette College in 1970 and was awarded a doctorate by the University of St. Andrews in 1975. He taught at Dartmouth College from 1975 to 1982, and has taught since 1982 at Middlebury College, where he is the D.E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College, a liberal arts college in Savannah that was founded in February, 2010. He is married to the writer and psychologist Devon Jersild; they have three sons.

Parini is a regular contributor to various journals and newspapers, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian (U.K.). His poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Poetry.

Parini's 1990 novel The Last Station was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film that was released in December 2009.

Parini was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. He was Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1993-1994. He was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London in 2005-2006.

Poetry

 * Singing in Time (1972) poems
 * Anthracite Country (1982) poems
 * Town Life (1988) poems
 * House of Days (1998) poems
 * The Art of Subtraction: new and selected poems (2005) poems

Fiction

 * The Love Run (1980) novel
 * The Patch Boys (1986) novel
 * The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year (1990)
 * Bay of Arrows (1992) novel
 * Benjamin's Crossing (1996) novel
 * The Apprentice Lover (2002) novel
 * The Passages of H.M., novel (2010)

Non-fiction

 * Theodore Roethke, an American Romantic (1979 - Criticism)
 * An Invitation to Poetry (1987)
 * A Vermont Christmas (1988)
 * John Steinbeck (1995) biography
 * Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Literature and Politics (1997) essays
 * Robert Frost: A Life (1999)
 * Passage to Liberty: The Story of Italian Immigration and the Rebirth of America (2002) with A. Kenneth Ciongoli
 * Anthony Quinn's Eye (2004) with Donald Kuspit and Tom Roberts
 * One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004)
 * The Art of Teaching (2005)
 * ''Why Poetry Matters (2008), criticism
 * ''Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (2008), criticism

Edited

 * Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1985) (editor with Robert Pack and Sydney Lea)
 * The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Short Stories (1987) editor with Robert Pack
 * The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays (1989) editor with Robert Pack
 * Richard Eberhart, New and Selected Poems 1930–1990 (1990) editor
 * Writers On Writing (1991) with Robert Pack
 * Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain (1992) editor
 * Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry (1993) editor with Robert Pack
 * Columbia History of American Poetry (1994), editor
 * Columbia Anthology of American Poetry (1995), editor
 * American Identities: Contemporary Multicultural Voices (1996) editor with Robert Pack
 * Touchstones : American Poets on a Favorite Poem (1996) (editor with Robert Pack).
 * Beyond "The Godfather" : Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience (1997) editor with A. Kenneth Ciongoli
 * The Norton Book of American Autobiography (1998) editor
 * Introspections : American Poets on One of Their Own Poems (1998) editor with Robert Pack
 * American Writers (2000) editor, yearly volumes
 * American Writers Classics I (2002), II (2004)
 * British Writers (2002) editor, yearly
 * Contemporary Poetry Of New England (2002) editor with Robert Pack
 * British Writers Classics (2003) editor
 * The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (2004) editor
 * World Writers in English (2003) editor
 * The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry (2005), editor