James Tate is the author of 11 books of poetry, among them "The Lost Pilot," "The Oblivion Ha-Ha," "Absences," "Viper Jazz," and most recently "Riven Doggeries," published by Ecco Press in 1979. In 1977, Tate won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Since then, he has received a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, and Emerson College, and is currently a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Paris Review, and his work is represented in "The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry" and "The Best of Modern Poetry." He is a board member of the Associated Writing Programs. [extracted from 1982 brochure]