David Dalton Yezzi (born 1966) is an American poet, editor, actor,[1] and professor. He currently teaches poetry in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Yezzi was born in Albany, New York[2] He attended The Doane Stuart School.[3][4][5] Yezzi earned a bachelor's degree in theater from Carnegie Mellon University and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.[6]
Yezzi was Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City from 2001 to 2005 and has worked as executive editor and, then, poetry editor of The New Criterion, associate editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and was on the staff of The New York Observer.[6] He is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and a former editor of The Hopkins Review.
Yezzi was a co-founder of the San Francisco theater company, Thick Description, and has performed in works by Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht, Goethe, Williams, and others in the United States and Europe.[6] In March 2010, Verse Theater Manhattan presented Yezzi's evening of verse monologues, Dirty Dan & Other Travesties, at the Bowery Poetry Club, with Yezzi performing "Tomorrow & Tomorrow." In October 2021, he performed the title role in The Baltimore Shakespeare Factory's production of King Lear.[7]
In 1998, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University (1998–2000).[6]
His poems have been published in literary journals including The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Poetry Daily and The New Criterion. His literary essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Sun, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The (London) Times Literary Supplement, Poetry and elsewhere.[6]
Yezzi's poem "The Call" was included in The Best American Poetry 2006 and "Minding Rites" appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012.
In December 2008, Azores was chosen as a Slate magazine "Best Book of 2008." In 2015, Birds of the Air was a finalist for the Poets' Prize.
