Joseph Stroud

Joseph Stroud, (born 1943, Glendale, California) is an American poet.^[1]

Life

He was educated at the University of San Francisco, California State University at Los Angeles, and San Francisco State University. He is currently retired from teaching at Cabrillo College.^[2]

He has published five collections of poetry, most recently Of This World; New and Selected Poems^[3] (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Country of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). His work earned a Pushcart Prize in 2000 and has been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. He was also a finalist for the Northern California Book Critics Award in 2005 and a year later was selected for a Witter Bynner Fellowship in poetry from the Library of Congress.^[4]

Varied in subject and form, Stroud’s poems include six-line lyrics, narrative prose poems, odes, homages, sustained contemplations, suites, and brief epigrammatic offerings. However it is substance, whatever form it takes, that interests him.^[5] His poetry articulates a voyage through places and times and voices, often sifting through the details of daily life, searching for miracles (“Inside the pear there’s a paradise we will never know, our only hint the sweetness of its taste.” - Comice, Below Cold Mountain).

He divides his time between his home in Santa Cruz, California, and a cabin in the Sierra Nevada.^[6]

Awards

• 2000 Pushcart Prize
• 2005 finalist for the Northern California Book Critics Award
• 2006 Witter Bynner Fellowship in poetry from the Library of Congress.
• 2011 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[7]

Works

• In the Sleep of Rivers. Capra Press. 1974. ISBN 978-0-912264-98-1. 
• Signatures. BOA. 1982. ISBN 978-0-918526-38-0. 
• Below Cold Mountain. Copper Canyon Press. 1998. ISBN 978-1-55659-084-9. 
• Country of Light. Copper Canyon Press. 2004. ISBN 978-1-55659-205-8. 
• Of This World: New and Selected Poems. Copper Canyon Press. 2008. ISBN 978-1-55659-285-0. 

Anthologies

• Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost, Jack Hicks, ed. (2004). "Missing; Hear that Phone Ringing? Sounds Like Long Distance; Manna". California poetry: from the Gold Rush to the present. Heyday Books. ISBN 978-1-890771-72-0. 
• Patrice Vecchione, ed. (2007). "Bible". Faith and Doubt: An Anthology of Poems. Illustrator Patrice Vecchione. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-8050-8213-5. 

References