Philip Metres

Philip Metres is the author and translator of a number of books and chapbooks, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020); The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan, 2018), winner of the 2019 Evelyn Shakir Award (Arab American Book Award in Non-Fiction); Pictures at an Exhibition: A Petersburg Album (University of Akron Press, 2016); the widely-praised Sand Opera (Alice James, 2015); and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State, 2015).

His work—including poetry, translation, essays, fiction, criticism, and scholarship—has garnered two NEA fellowships, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.” His poems have been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Polish, Russian, and Tamil.

He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. He lives with his family in Cleveland, Ohio.