As Interviewed By: Rabindra Swain & Preston Merchant Jayanta Mahapatra was born in 1928 in Cuttack, in the Indian state of Orissa. Trained as a scientist, he taught college physics for thirty-six years. He started writing poetry at age 40, quickly becoming one of India’s most celebrated poets and one of its best known abroad. [...]

Interviewer’s Note: Born in Los Angeles in 1950, Dana Gioia attended Stanford University and did graduate work at Harvard where he studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald. He left Harvard to attend Stanford Business School. For fifteen years he worked in New York for General Foods (eventually becoming a Vice President) while writing nights [...]

Stephen Burt grew up in Washington, D.C., graduated from Harvard College in 1994, and did graduate work at Oxford and then at Yale. He teaches at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota. His first book of literary criticism, Randall Jarrell and His Age, won the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism in [...]

 Interviewer’s Note: Adam Kirsch was born in Los Angeles in 1976. After studying English at Harvard, with a focus on poetry, he went to work at The New Republic as assistant literary editor. After leaving the magazine, he moved to New York and started work as an editor at Lipper Publications, the co-publisher of the [...]

Interviewer’s Note: Poet and essayist Sherod Santos is the author of four books of poetry, Accidental Weather (Doubleday, 1982), The Southern Reaches (Wesleyan, 1989), The City of Women (W. W. Norton, 1993), and, most recently, The Pilot Star Elegies (W. W. Norton, 1999), which was both a National Book Award Finalist and one of five [...]