1. 1. Di Piero, winner of the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Tombo (McSweeney’s, 2014). Of his poems, Lisa Russ Spaar exclaims, “Oneiric, kinetic, cinematic, fugal, inclusive, Di Piero’s…lyrics, litanies, and prose poems arrest the reader not only with his familiar acid bite of voluptuous street-wise music, his mix of Old and New World confluences, but also with an intensified and intimate vulnerability, complicated by fear, the aging body, the inexorability of change, and a restive, ‘fatal cherishing’ of this world.” Di Piero’s other poetry collections include Nitro Nights (Copper Canyon, 2011), Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 2007), Brother Fire (Knopf, 2006), and Skirts and Slacks (Knopf, 2001).

His poems have appeared frequently in Poetry, The New Yorker, and Threepenny Review, and he has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and other periodicals, and he also writes a monthly column on the visual arts for an independent newsweekly, The San Diego Reader. His autobiographical essays have appeared twice in Best American Essays. His books also include translations from Greek and Italian.

A well-known essayist on art, literature, culture, and personal experience, the latest of Di Piero’s five essay collections, When Can I See You Again? (Pressed Wafer, 2010), contains his recent art writings. Other art essays include Shooting the Works: On Poetry and Pictures (Triquarterly, 1996) and Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Arts (University of California Press, 1993). An accomplished speaker on these subjects, his lecture “Poets and Painters” explores the conversation between the languages of the written word and the visual arts by looking at his own poetry and the work other poets (Baudelaire, Rilke, Browning, Pound, William Carlos Williams) who have known or written about visual artists (Delacroix, Cezanne/Van Gogh, Renaissance painters, modern contemporary artists).

In “A Poet’s Glossary of Terms,” Di Piero discourses on Charm, Form, History, Laughter, Uncertainty, Ecstasy, Occasion, Accident in regard to his own poetry as well as that of poets past and present. “The Music of Origins” is derived from two autobiographical essays (“Gots Is What You Got” and “Pocketbook and Sauerkraut,” both in City Dog) about how the language of his poems originated: “It has to do with my childhood, the crazy language I heard around me growing up (and the people who spoke it), working class immigrant culture, the nature of work, how language expresses temperament, etc. Along the way I touch on Keats and Pasolini.”

Di Piero has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award. He lives in San Francisco.