James Richardson

James Richardson (AB Princeton 1971, PhD Virginia 1975) joined the Princeton Department of English in 1980 and is now Professor of English and Creative Writing, teaching beginning and advanced poetry workshops, Prosody, Reading Literature: Poetry, Contemporary Poetry, and Lyric Poetry.

Richardson was awarded the 2011 Jackson Poetry Prize. His collections include By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms, which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2010, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2001) (e.g. “All work is the avoidance of harder work” “You’ve never said anything as stupid as what people thought you said”), How Things Are (2000), A Suite for Lucretians (1999), As If (1992), Second Guesses (1984), and Reservations (1977). He is also the author of two critical studies, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity (1977) and Vanishing Lives: Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne and Yeats (1988).

Richardson has recent poems and aphorisms in Slate, The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Harold Bloom’s American Religious Poems, David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: Poe to the Present, Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and several volumes of The Best American Poetry, and essays/reviews on Bishop, Gregg, Larkin, Merrill, Merwin, Browning, Van Duyn, proverbs and aphorisms, “dead lady poems,” and how the brain dreams and reads.