Robert Pinsky,
a prize-winning poet, essayist and translator, became the 39th United States Poet Laureate in 1997.  The author of five books of poetry, including most recently, The Figured Wheel:  New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, Pinsky propelled Dante onto the best-seller lists with his acclaimed 1994 verse translation of the Inferno.  He currently teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Boston University and is a regular contributor to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, reading poems linked to news events.  Pinsky is also the poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.  "He has commented that computers and poetry share two key attributes:" reports the New York Times, "Speed and memory."
     In addition to his poetry, Professor Pinsky is the author of prose works including The Situation of Poetry and Poetry and the World, as well as a translation of The Separate Notebooks by Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz.  His translation of The Inferno of Dante was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, given by The Nation and the Academy of American Poets.  In the fall of 1998, he will publish The Sounds of Poetry:  A Brief Guide (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and an anthology of poems about heartbreak called Handbook of Heartbreak (William Morrow).   

[extracted from 1998 brochure]