American writer (born 1970)
Philip Metres (born July 4, 1970) is an American writer, poet, translator, scholar, and essayist.
His poetry books include Shrapnel Maps, Pictures at an Exhibition, and Sand Opera. He has published poems, essays, and reviews in literary journals and magazines including Poetry,[1] American Poetry Review, New England Review, Tin House,[2] Ploughshares, New American Writing, Massachusetts Review, and others.[3][4][5] His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry; The New American Poetry of Engagement; With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century;[6] A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (2011); I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights (2009);[7] and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry (2008).
Biography
Metres was born in July 4, 1970, in San Diego and grew up in Chicago.[8] After receiving a B.A., magna cum laude, from the College of the Holy Cross, he went on to earn an M.A. (English), M.F.A. (poetry), and Ph.D. (English) at Indiana University at Bloomington.[9] He is currently a professor of English and Director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University[10] and is core faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts M.F.A. program.
In 2019, Metres was a faculty member at the 2019 Conference on Poetry at The Frost Place. He teaches issues related to nonviolent resistance and peacebuilding in the United States, Middle East, and Northern Ireland.[11][12] Of Lebanese descent on his father's side, Metres plays a role in the Arab-American literary scene. Metres currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife, the writer Amy Breau, and their two daughters. His family of origin includes psychologists Kay Dannemann Metres (mother) and Phil Metres Jr. (father), entrepreneur Katherine Metres (sister), and attorney David Metres (brother).
Honors
Metres' honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Literary Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, three Arab American Book Awards in poetry, the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize, a Creative Workforce Fellowship, seven Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry (2019), the Lyric Poetry Prize (2016), the Anne Halley Prize for best poem by Massachusetts Review (2012), the Cleveland Arts Prize (Emerging Artist) (2010),[13] Jury Prize for To See the Earth (Lit's Literary Showcase, 2008), Twin Cranes Peace Poem Prize; "For the Fifty Who Formed PEACE with Their Bodies," and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship (2001).
His first book, Behind the Lines, received the International PeaceWriting Award. During his Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (1992–93), he began to translate contemporary Russian poetry, and he has since published numerous translations of the poetry of Sergey Gandlevsky, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky.
