page_title: Karl Kirchwey
section_title: College years
hierarchical_section_title: Karl Kirchwey / Career / College years
caption_attribution_description: Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, USA - Samuel Phillips Hall, front facade.
context_page_description: Karl Kirchwey is an award-winning American poet who has lived in both Europe and the United States and whose work is strongly influenced by the Greek and Roman past. He often looks to the classical world for inspiration, with themes which have included loss, loneliness, nostalgia, and modern atrocities, and how the past relates to the present. While he is best known for his poems, he also is a book reviewer, award-winning teacher of creative writing, translator, arts administrator, literary curator, and advocate for writers and writing. He was director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y for 13 years, directed and taught in the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College from 2000 to 2010, served as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome from 2010 to 2013, and is currently professor and director of the MFA Program in creative writing at Boston University.
context_section_description: Kirchwey was born in 1956 and graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover in 1974 in the boarding school's first co-educational class, which included jazz musician Bill Cunliffe, software executive Peter Currie, actor Dana Delany, painter Julian Hatton, writer Nate Lee, political commentator Heather Mac Donald, restaurateur Priscilla Martel, TV producer Jonathan Meath, editor Sara Nelson, and sculptor Gar Waterman. He attended Yale, where he was a classmate of Todd LaRoche, but described his first two undergraduate years as "unfocused and unproductive." He took a class on versification taught by Penelope Laurans, which gave him the sense that he had an "ear for verse", but his work was "less than diligent" in his own estimation. He took a year off and worked at Cutler's Record Shop in New Haven. After his year off, he studied with poet John Hollander and discovered that building a life around the task of writing poetry was possible. Kirchwey described Hollander as a master of both English and American poetry and said:
  Since he (John Hollander) is a poet himself ... he conveyed a passion for that knowledge as a source of current inspiration.
  --Karl Kirchwey in 2001
  Hollander taught him that poems were more than mere creations, but have an inspirational force, and gave Kirchwey greater respect for intellectual and artistic pursuits, as well as for Yale.
  Why was Yale unique? At that point it wasn't because there was a creative writing program there, because there wasn't (and still isn't). Instead, it had to do with a sense that creative writing, that poetry in my case, was arising out of this superb intellectual climate where art was taken seriously.
  --Karl Kirchwey in 2001
  Kirchwey graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from Yale and with an master of arts in English literature from Columbia.
caption: Kirchwey attended Phillips Academy in Andover.
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