Degrees and Studies: MA, M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University School of Arts and Sciences, in English and Comparative Literature; M.F.A. in writing, prosody, translation, Columbia University School of the Arts; Certificate in language instruction, The New School; Post-Bac in Studio Art and Film, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. BA, magna cum laude with honors and the Kaufmann Prize (awarded to one graduating English major), Williams College and Cambridge University; Diplome de Civilisation Francaise, Sorbonne, Extension Universitaire.

Stephen Massimilla’s fields of interest include 19^th and 20^th /21^st century fiction, poetry and poetics; Romanticism; Core Curriculum (surveys of myth, epic, drama and philosophy, Western and non-Western traditions); Postmodernism and Postcolonialism; creative writing; translation; and film. As the former co-manager of an art gallery who has worked as a mural painter, a translator, and a photography book reviewer, as well as an editor at Art in America and elsewhere, Massimilla has lately been interested in exploring the interrelationship between different arts, genres, and languages. His current project focuses on connections between lyric poetry, philosophy, food writing, and the culinary arts. He has also written extensively on the role of myth and allusions to antiquity in modernist literature. He has written on Homer, Dante, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Nietzsche, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, W.C. Williams, Lorca, Walcott, contemporary poetry, Bergman, and Freud. Massimilla’s articles, poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and magazines, including AGNI, APR, The American Literary Review, Ariel, Review of International English Literature, Barrow Street, Chelsea, The Colorado Review, The Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Descant, Epoch, High Plains Literary Review, The Marlboro Review, Natural Bridge, Provincetown Arts Magazine, The Southern Review, Tampa Review, Quarterly West, Verse Daily, and anthologies such as the Meridian Poetry Anthology, When Icarus Falls, and New Hungers from Old: One Hundred Years of Italian-American Poetry.

Massimilla’s book Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera, 2002) received the SoniaRaiziss-Giop Prize and was translated into Italian by Luigi Bonaffini; his sonnet sequence Later on Aiaia (2001) received the Grolier Poetry Prize; his volume Almost a Second Thought was runner-up for the National Poetry Book Award judged by X.J. Kennedy. His most recent poetry book is entitled The Plague Doctor with his Hull-Shaped Hat. Other work received a van Rennsalaer Award and a prize from the Academy of American Poets. Massimilla has been interviewed on public radio and television, presented papers at numerous conferences, and performed his work at many venues, including Carnegie Hall. He teaches or has taught courses in literary classics, modernist/postmodernist poetry and novels, poetry writing, American literature, philosophy, myth, composition, ESL, and other subjects at Columbia University, Barnard College, the 92nd Street Y, The Juilliard School, The New School and The School of Visual Arts. Massimilla has also completed hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings, a portion of which he has exhibited in galleries in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.

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