Background

William Baer was born on December 29, 1948, in Geneva, New York, the son of William Edward and Margaret Jean (Boyd) Baer. He was raised in The Bronx, New York City, and Wayne, New Jersey.

Education

After graduating from Rutgers University with a Bachelor of Arts in English, William received a Master of Arts in English from New York University. He completed his doctoral dissertation in English at the University of South Carolina under the direction of James Dickey. He also earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from the Johns Hopkins University in 1980 and a Master of Arts in Cinema from USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1987.

Career

After attending the Johns Hopkins’ Writing Seminars, William Baer served as a Fulbright professor at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. He then was lecturer at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, from 1983 to 1989, and since 1989 he has been professor of English at the University of Evansville, Indiana.

Baer was the founding editor of The Formalist, a literary journal dedicated to Formalist poetry. The journal's verse is strictly metrical, in traditional forms and styles, and Baer reserved space for essays and interviews exploring form and meter. Contributors to The Formalist include Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, James Merrill, Joseph Brodsky, Mona Van Duyn, Anthony Hecht, Maxine Kumin, Octavio Paz, W.D. Snodgrass, Wendy Cope, and John Updike. About The Formalist Baer has said, “We’ve been especially fortunate to have the participation of some of the foremost contemporary poets in the English language.”

Baer edited Conversations with Derek Walcott, published in 1996. Conversations with Derek Walcott includes interviews with the author about poetry, theatre, and his opinions about other significant writers, including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky, and V. S. Naipaul.

He is also the former poetry editor and film critic for Crisis Magazine. Currently, he serves as the founding director of the St. Robert Southwell Institute, and previously he served as the director of the University of Evansville Press, the contributing editor at Measure, the faculty director of The Evansville Review, and the founding director of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Series.

Achievements

• During his life William Baer has authored and edited twenty-two books, among them The Unfortunates, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1997, and Bocage and Other Sonnets, recipient of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize.

Works

More photos

• bbok

  • Classic American Films: Conversations with the Screenwriters

    (Classic American Films explores the origin and developmen...)

    2007

• book

  • "Bocage" and Other Sonnets

    (“Bocage” and Other Sonnets is a collection of meticulousl...)

    2008
  • Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets

    (Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets is a unique collection ...)

    2005
  • One-and-Twenty Tales

    (With these brilliant and profoundly affecting short tales...)

    2015
  • Selected Sonnets

    (The most important writer in Portuguese history and one o...)

    2008
  • Rhyming Poems: A Contemporary Anthology

    (From ancient times to the present, poets have used the po...)

    2007
  • Thirteen on Form: Conversations with Poets

    (In the final two decades of the last century, a group of ...)

    2016
  • The Unfortunates: Poems

    (A unique collection of uncompromising poetic portraits wr...)

    1997
  • Psalter: A Sequence of Catholic Sonnets

    (In a fresh telling of biblical stories, William Baer take...)

    2011
  • Writing Metrical Poetry

    (Write poetry in the great metrical tradition of Dante, Sh...)

    2006
  • Conversations With Derek Walcott 1996
  • Love Sonnets 2016
  • The Ballad Rode Into Town 2007

Connections

On October 10, 1987, William married Mona Diane Campanella. They have two children: William and Margaret.

Father:

William Edward Baer

Mother:

Margaret Jean (Boyd) Baer

Spouse:

Mona Diane (Campanella) Baer

Son:

William Baer

Daughter:

Margaret Baer

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2008