Robert Dana

Infobox academic
name = Robert Dana

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image_size = 150px
birth_date = 1929
birth_place = Boston, Massachusetts
nationality = United States
field = Poetry
work_institutions = University of Florida
alma_mater = University of Iowa
Drake University
doctoral_advisor =
doctoral_students =
known_for =
prizes = Poet Laureate

Robert Dana (born 1929) is an award-winning American poet and the poet laureate for the State of Iowa.

Biography

Robert Dana was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1929. He served in the South Pacific in World War II as a U.S. Navy radio operator. After the War, he moved from Boston to Des Moines, Iowa, where he attended Drake University and worked as a sportswriter for the Des Moines Register. Later he studied at the University of Iowa and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and received a Masters Degree in 1954. From 1954-1994 he served as Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. [http://www.cornellcollege.edu/news_center/press_releases/nr2004/dana.shtml Emeritus professor Dana named Iowa's Poet Laureate] ] In 1964, Dana was responsible for the resumption of the publication of The North American Review, and served as its editor for a number of years. He also taught at the University of Florida. [http://www.english.ufl.edu/crw/]

Dana has published over a dozen collections of his poetry. In addition, Dana's work has appeared in publications such as The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Poetry (magazine), The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and The Sewanee Review.

Dana's poetry has won a number of awards. His poetry collection "Starting Out for the Difficult World" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1989 he was the recipient of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry, given by New York University. He received a Pushcart Prize in 1996, and has been awarded the Rainer Maria Rilke Prize for Poetry. He has also been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1985 and 1993).

In September 2004, Robert Dana was named poet laureate for the State of Iowa. He has also served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Stockholm University and at several American colleges and universities.

Bibliography

Poetry

*"My Glass Brother and Other Poems" (Constance Press/Stonewall Press 1957)
*"The Dark Flags of Waking" (1964)
*"Some Versions of Silence" (W.W.Norton 1967)
*"The Power of the Visible" (The Swallow Press 1971)
*"In a Fugitve Season: A Sequence of Poems" (Ohio University Press 1980)
*"What the Stones Know" (1982)
*"Blood Harvest" (1986)
*"Starting Out for the Difficult World" (Harper & Row, 1987)
*"What I Think I Know: New and Selected Poems" (1991)
*"Yes, Everything" (Another Chicago Press, 1994)
*"Hello, Stranger: Beach Poems" (Anhinga Press, 1996)
*"Summer" (Anhinga Press, 2000)
*"The Morning of the Red Admirals" (Anhinga Press, 2004)

Prose

*"Against the Grain: Interviews with Maverick American Publishers" (1986)

References