Karl Kirchwey

Career Kirchwey has taught at the secondary school level at The American School in Switzerland (TASIS) and Elizabeth Irwin High School (New York City). At the college and university level, he has taught in and directed the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College (2000–10), directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Boston University (2014–16; 2025-present) , and served as Associate Dean of Faculty for the Humanities in the College of Arts & Sciences at Boston University (2017–22).

Kirchwey's first magazine publications as a poet included The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Yale Review, Prairie Schooner, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Nation, and The New Criterion. These poems were gathered in his first book, A Wandering Island (1990), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.

His fifth book, The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose (2007) resulted from a trip to Saipan (Northern Marianas Islands), Cambodia, and India, and included an extended hybrid essay in poetry and prose entitled “A Yatra for Yama.” A second book of Roman poems, Stumbling Blocks, followed in 2017. This book took its title from the Holocaust memorial art project by German artist Gunter Demnig.

Throughout his career, Kirchwey has occasionally translated poetry, primarily from French and Italian. His translation of poet Paul Verlaine's first book appeared in 2011 as Poems Under Saturn, and his volume of translations entitled More Honor in Betrayal: Selected Poems 1965–1984 by Italian poet Giovanni Giudici (1924–2011) is forthcoming.

While working at the American Academy in Rome, Kirchwey prepared literary walking itineraries, and these gave rise to his first anthology, Roman Poems, gathering mostly English-language poems about the Eternal City from the Renaissance to the present. His second anthology, Poems of Healing, was begun before the COVID pandemic. His own work has been widely anthologized, including four times in The Best American Poetry (1991, 1995, 1998, 2018), and in The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1987–1998.

Kirchwey's essays and reviews have appeared in Literary Imagination, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Provincetown Arts, Slate, Stagebill (New York City Opera), and elsewhere. and Raritan. and portions of it have been published in journals including Little Star, Arion, AGNI, The Antioch Review, Literary Imagination, The Yale Review , an adaptation of the Alcestis of Euripides.