Philip Metres is the author of ten books, most recently Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020) which Library Journal described as “at once intimate and politically taut,” 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) which the Kenyon Review described as a “complex document of both daily life and the horrors of history,” and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State, 2015). His next collection of poems is Fugitive/Refuge, coming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2024.
His work—including poetry, translation, essays, fiction, criticism, and scholarship—has garnered a Lannan fellowship, 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.
In an interview with Christopher Nelson, Metres was asked if feeling was his compass when writing a poem: “There is no question that what brought me to poems in the first place was that it offered a language for the seethe of emotions I felt as a young man—awe and confusion, attraction and anger, longing and grief. Of course, I found my footing in poetry when I embraced the notion that a poem was a made thing, a kind of architecture inside which I—and then a reader—could dwell.”
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.
