African Bestiary

Willis Barnstone, born in 1927 in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin College, (B.A), the Sorbonne, SOAS in London (M.A in Oriental Studies), Columbia (M.A.) and Yale (PhD),. He taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), was in Haiti during the deadly rule of Papa Doc (1960, in China during the Cultural Revolution in 1972. and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War (1975-1976). A Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984-1985). Former O’Connor Professor of Greek and Latin at Colgate University (1973-1974), he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University. A Guggenheim fellow, he received NEA, NEH, ACLS, W.H. Auden Award of NY Council on the Arts, Midland Authors Award, 4 Book of the Month selections, 4 Pulitzer nominations, 6 Poetry Society of America prizes, including the Emily Dickinson Award. In 2015 he won the Fred Cody Life Achievement Award, and the Daedalus Award from the Greek Classical Academy. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Poetry, New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement. -He lives in Oakland, California, and Paris.