Joseph Stroud

Born in Glendale, California, poet and translator Joseph Stroud was educated at the University of San Francisco; California State University, Los Angeles; and San Francisco State University.
 
Using a variety of formal approaches, Stroud’s poems address a wide range of historical and international settings. In a 2009 Bookslut review of Of This World, critic John Madera praised Stroud’s “recognition of our frailty, forgetfulness and inattention, amidst the noise of avarice, war, and other distractions, coupled with a profound and compassionate awareness of everything that breathes around him.”
 
Stroud has published several collections of poetry, including Signatures (1982); Below Cold Mountain (1998); Country of Light (2004), a finalist for the 2005 Northern California Book Critics Award; and Of This World: New and Selected Poems (2008).
 
Stroud has been awarded the Library of Congress’s Witter Bynner Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. His work has also been featured on Garrison Keillor’s program for National Public Radio, The Writer’s Almanac. In 2014, he was awarded the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in California, where he divides his time between Santa Cruz and a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains.