Robert Pinsky was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. The author of nineteen books, his most recent are Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town (prose, Chicago, 2009) and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). In 2002 he guest-starred in an episode of The Simpsons TV show, and in 2010, he premiered his libretto for Death and the Powers, an opera by composer Tod Machover. His Poets Q&A appears at smartishpace.com, and his poetry in Smartish Pace, Issue 20. [updated 2013]
