Photo credit: Stephani Dayani

David St. John is an American poet. He has been honored, over the course of his career, with many prizes for poets, including: both the Rome Prize Fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library; and the George Drury Smith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation.

He is the author of eleven collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), most recently The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is the co-editor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry and the editor of The Selected Levis and The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems of Larry Levis.

David St. John has written libretti for the opera, THE FACE, and for the choral symphony, THE SHORE. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016) and named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2017). David St. John is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of English at The University of Southern California. He lives with his wife, poet and essayist Anna Journey, in Venice Beach, California.