Dan Chiasson

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Chiasson

Dan Chiasson (; born May 9, 1971) is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country's most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature and Chair of the English Department at Wellesley College.

Chiasson is the author of six books: The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) and The Math Campers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020).

Chiasson is currently working on a nonfiction book, Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People's Politician, based in part on his own early memories of Mayor Sanders, to be published by Knopf in 2026.

Life

Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont. He grew up in the city of Burlington as the only child of his single mother. He attended Catholic schools, Mater Christi School and Rice Memorial High School, from which he graduated in 1989. He graduated summa cum laude in Classics and English from Amherst College (1993), and from Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in English and was awarded the Whiting Foundation Award in the Humanities.

In addition to teaching at Wellesley, Chiasson has been affiliated with Boston University's Master of Fine Arts program, with NYU's program in Paris, France, and with the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Environmental Conference in Ripton, Vermont. He was a 2017 James Merrill House Fellow in Stonington, CT. He lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.

Chiasson is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He was the poetry editor (with Meghan O'Rourke), and later advisory editor, of the Paris Review. His poems have been translated into many languages, including German by Jan Wagner. His Natural History was published as Naturgeschichte at Luxbooks, a publishing house focused on American poetry in bilingual editions. In the UK, he is published by Bloodaxe Books.

He is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.

Honors and awards

• 2008 Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry
• 2004 Whiting Award

Bibliography

See also links in the External links section below.

Poetry

Collections

Anthologies

List of poems

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected
The anatomy of melancholy	2001
Nocturne	2001
From 'The Names of 1,001 Strangers'	2017
Obituary	2014
Self	2000
Swifts	2008

Criticism

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Notes

External links

• Search for Chiasson's work in The New Yorker
• Search for Chiasson's work in The New York Review of Books
• Search for Chiasson's work in The Paris Review
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation
• Dan Chiasson interviewed by Christopher Lydon, "Whose Words These Are", Radio Open Source, May 27, 2010
• "Amherst Poets Dream Date: Interview with Dan Chiasson" by Josh Jacobs, September 2011