Mark Strand

Strand was born in 1934 at Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, to Robert Joseph Strand and Sonia Apter. Raised in a secular Jewish family, he spent his early years in North America and much of his adolescence in South and Central America. Strand graduated from Oakwood Friends School in 1951 and in 1957 earned his B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio. He then studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University, where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. On a U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission scholarship, Strand studied 19th-century Italian poetry in Florence in 1960-1961. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa the following year and earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1962. In 1965, he spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer.

In 1981, Strand was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress during the 1990-1991 term. In 1998, he left Johns Hopkins University to accept the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professorship of Social Thought at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. From 2005 to his death, Strand taught literature and creative writing at Columbia University, in New York City.

Strand received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Blizzard of One. Harold Bloom included three volumes of Strand's poetry in his list of works defining the Western Canon.

Strand died of liposarcoma on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.

Many of Strand's poems are nostalgic in tone, evoking the bays, fields, boats, and pines of his Prince Edward Island childhood. He has been compared to Robert Bly in his use of surrealism, though he attributes his poems' surreal elements to an admiration of the works of Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, and René Magritte. Strand's poems use plain and concrete language, usually without rhyme or meter. In a 1971 interview, he said, "I feel very much a part of a new international style that has a lot to do with plainness of diction, a certain reliance on surrealist techniques, and a strong narrative element."

Strand's academic career took him to various colleges and universities, including:

Teaching positions

• University of Iowa, Iowa City, instructor in English, 1962-1965
• University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Fulbright lecturer, 1965-1966
• Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, assistant professor, 1967
• Columbia University, New York City, adjunct associate professor, 1969-1972
• Brooklyn College, New York City, associate professor, 1970-1972
• Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Bain-Swiggett Lecturer, 1973
• Brandeis University, Hurst professor of poetry, 1974-1975
• University of Utah, Salt Lake City, professor of English, 1981-1993
• Johns Hopkins University, Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry, 1994-c. 1998
• University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, 1998, ca. 2005
• Columbia University, New York City, professor of English and Comparative Literature, ca. 2005-2014

Visiting professor

• University of Washington, 1968, 1970
• Columbia University, 1980
• Yale University, 1969-1970
• University of Virginia, 1976, 1978
• California State University, Fresno, 1977
• University of California, Irvine, 1979
• Wesleyan University, 1979
• Harvard University, 1980

Strand was awarded the following:

• 1960, 1961: Fulbright Fellowship
• 1979: Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets
• 1987: MacArthur Fellowship
• 1990, 1991: Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
• 1992: Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
• 1993: Bollingen Prize
• 1999: Pulitzer Prize, for Blizzard of One
• 2004: Wallace Stevens Award
• 2009: Gold Medal in Poetry, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters