Bill Zavatsky

Bill Zavatsky holds B.A. and M.F.A degrees from Columbia University. He has taught at all levels of education since 1971. For many years he taught in the high school at the Trinity School in Manhattan, and most recently at the Eugene Lang College of the New School. His poetry-writing workshop has been ongoing at the Morningside Heights Library since May of 2013.
Bill has published three books of poems, Where X Marks the Spot, For Steve Royal and Other Poems, and Theories of Rain and Other Poems. His translation (with Zack Rogow) of André Breton’s Earthlight won the PEN/Book-of-the Month Translation Prize. His revised translation (with Ron Padgett) of Valery Larbaud’s The Poems of A.O. Barnabooth is also available. His translations of poems by Robert Desnos appear in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry and in Essential Poems and Writings of Robert Desnos, edited by Mary Ann Caws
Bill has published in many magazines and anthologies and reads his work widely. His poems have served as liner notes for recordings by jazz pianists Bill Evans and Marc Copland.
The New York State Council on the Arts awarded Bill a fellowship in poetry, as did the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007 and 2008 Bill received MacDowell Colony fellowships. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2008.

Photo by Margaretta Mitchell