A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines

Meet the Author

JOHN HAINES, poet, essayist, and teacher was born in 1924 and died in March 2011. After studying painting, he spent more than twenty years homesteading in Alaska. The author of more than ten collections of poetry, his works include At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer and New Poems 1980-88, for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award. He has also published a book of essays entitled Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays, and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-five Years in the Northern Wilderness. He has taught at Ohio University, George Washington University, University of Montana, Bucknell University, and the University of Cincinnati. He was Guest Poet at both the International Shakespeare Conference at Vladimir University, Russia and at Summer Wordsworth Conference, Grasmere, UK. He was Resident at the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy and Rasmuson Fellow at the U.S. Artists Meeting, Los Angeles. Named a Fellow by The Academy of American Poets in 1997, his other honors include the Alaska Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress. In 2008, Sewanee Review awarded Haines the Atkin Taylor Award for Poetry.