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Gerald Stern is a prolific American poet, the first-ever poet laureate of New Jersey and a winner of several prestigious awards for literary excellence.

He has written 15 books of poetry, many of which have received great acclaim. Most notably, he won the 1998 National Book Award for “This Time: New and Selected Poems.” Stern’s other books include “Bread without Sugar,” which earned him the Paterson Poetry Prize, and “The Red Coal,” which won the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent collection, titled “Save the Last Dance: Poems,” was published in 2008.

According to noted radio personality Garrison Keillor, host of public radio’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” Stern’s “fine poems” have earned him a “mantleful of awards, fellowships and grants.” These include a Guggenheim fellowship; four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts; the Lamont Poetry Prize; and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He also received the Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award for Poetry, and the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review. In 2005, he won the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry and the National Jewish Book Award for poetry.

According to the Publisher’s Weekly review of “This Time: New and Selected Poems,” the book “is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward [Stern’s] own past.” Publisher’s Weekly goes on to compare Stern to literary titan Walt Whitman, saying “the greatest joy here lies in the excellence of Stern's longer sentences, which recall Whitman in their life-like pulse and flow, in their subtle verbal patternings that submerge rhetorical artifice beneath the breath of actual speech.” In addition to the National Book Award, the collection also won the 1996 Ruth Lilly Prize.

Keillor attributes some of Stern’s greatness to his normal upbringing in Pittsburgh, where he was born in 1925. He writes that the poet spent time “shooting pool, drinking beer, playing football, dancing and writing poetry”-activities that influenced his masterworks.

Throughout his career, Stern has held many academic positions. He has taught at Temple University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the currently the distinguished poet-in-residence for Drew University’s Master of Fine Arts in Poetry program.

He earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 and a MA from Columbia University in 1949. He also did postgraduate work at the University of Paris until 1950.