Robert Hass

Robert Hass is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, recognized as Distinguished Professor of Poetry and Poetics. In Literature, his work centers on contemporary American poetry and translation, with recent interests extending to environmental history and literature. He received a BA from Saint Mary's College of California in 1963, an MA from Stanford University in 1965, and a PhD from Stanford University in 1971. Hass began his teaching career at Saint Mary's College, serving from 1971 to 1989, before joining UC Berkeley in 1989. He retired in 2019 after 30 years at the institution, during which he founded the acclaimed Lunch Poems reading series and co-founded the River of Words organization to foster ecoliteracy in young students through poetry and art. From 1995 to 1997, he served as U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, promoting poetry's role in public life.

Hass has garnered major awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, the National Book Award for Poetry in 2007, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008 for Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Additional honors encompass the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1972 for Field Guide, the William Carlos Williams Award in 1979 for Praise, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1996 for Sun Under Wood, the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2013 for What Light Can Do, and the Wallace Stevens Award in 2014. His key publications include poetry collections such as Field Guide (1973), Praise (1979), Human Wishes (1989), Sun Under Wood (1996), The Apple Trees at Olema (2010), and Summer Snow (2020); prose works like Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns (2008), What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (2012), and A Little Book on Form (2017); and edited volumes such as Modernist Women Poets (2014). Hass has significantly translated Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz's poetry, with volumes including The Separate Notebooks (1984), Unattainable Earth (1986), Provinces (1991), Road-Side Dog (1998), Treatise on Poetry (2001), and Second Space (2004). His scholarship and creative output have profoundly influenced American poetry, criticism, translation, and environmental literary studies, evidenced by his roles as a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Professional Email: bobhass@berkeley.edu