Bradford Morrow


Bradford Morrow is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children's book writer. Professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine.
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Life

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 8, 1951, Morrow grew up in Littleton, Colorado, and, "after a decade of vagabonding from Honduras to France, Italy to England", settled in New York City, where he remains. In 1966, he was selected by the Colorado Medical Association to serve with a small number of other teenage volunteers as a medical assistant with the Amigos de las Americas program, giving inoculations and working with health-care professionals in poor, very rural areas in Honduras. The following year, 1967–1968, Morrow was a foreign exchange student under the auspices of the American Field Service, completing his final year of high school at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. After completing his B.A. in English Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder, 1969–1972, where he graduated summa cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa, he received a Danforth Fellowship to continue graduate studies in English and comparative literature at Yale University. Upon leaving Yale, Morrow moved first to Ithaca, New York, where he began research on a full-scale bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, consulting the archives at Cornell University, and then to Santa Barbara, California, where he met John Martin, of Black Sparrow Press, who would publish the bibliography in 1978.
The literary biannual journal Conjunctions was conceived in late 1980 as "Morrow sat in Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth's library in Santa Barbara, California. The two friends had the idea to assemble a Festschrift for James Laughlin, the beloved editor of New Directions." After being published by David R. Godine and Collier Books/Scribner, the journal was picked up by Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, which was the journal's publisher for 33 years. Bard ceased publishing Conjunctions after the Spring 2025 issue.
Morrow became Rexroth's literary executor in 1982, and has edited and introduced a number of the poet's books, including The Selected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited, World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, More Classics Revisited, and with Sam Hamill coedited The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.
He has taught at Princeton, Brown, and Columbia Universities, as well as the Naropa Institute. A professor emeritus, from 1990-2025 he was a professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College.
The Review of Contemporary Fiction published a "Bradford Morrow issue" in 2000, which included essays by Sven Birkerts, Forrest Gander, Patrick McGrath, Robert Creeley, Joanna Scott, Brian Evenson, William T. Vollmann, Maureen Howard and others.

Works

Novels

  • The Forger's Requiem
  • The Forger's Daughter
  • The Prague Sonata The Forgers The Diviner's Tale Ariel’s Crossing ; Second volume of his "New Mexico Trilogy"Giovanni's Gift Trinity Fields ; First volume of his "New Mexico Trilogy," Finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book AwardThe Almanac Branch ; Finalist for the 1992 PEN/Faulkner Award
  • ''Come Sunday''

Short fiction

The Nature of My Inheritance The Uninnocent
  • ''Fall of the Birds''

Illustrated books

Didn’t Didn’t Do It
  • ''A Bestiary''

Poetry collections

After a Charme The Preferences Danae's Progress Posthumes
  • ''Passing From the Provinces''

Works in progress

Meditations on a Shadow, selected essays.

Edited books

Conjunctions The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. The New Gothic More Classics Revisited Thirty Six Poems of Tu Fu The Houses of Children World outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth Classics Revisited

Contributions to anthologies

  • The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries
  • New Jersey Noir.
  • Best American Noir of the Century.
  • Chronotopes & Dioramas.
  • River of Words: Portraits of Hudson Valley Writers.
  • Poe’s Children.
  • Paraspheres: Fabulist and New Fabulist Stories.
  • Murder in the Rough.
  • The O'Henry Prize Stories, 2003.
  • Pushcart Prize XXVII.
  • A Convergence of Birds.
  • Searching For Your Soul.
  • The Norton Anthology of Love.
  • Bomb/Speak: Writers in Conversation.
  • The Place Within: Portraits of the American Landscape by Twenty Contemporary Writers.
  • The Literary Insomniac: Stories and Essays for Sleepless Nights
  • Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives.
  • The Future of Fiction: Review of Contemporary Fiction 16.1. Edited by David Foster Wallace. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996. Includes essay Rivages Roses for Niels Bohr.)
  • ''Blast III.''

Awards and honors

From the judges’ citation: “We were astonished to discover that Bradford Morrow has not already won this award, after 25 years of editing almost by himself one of our most distinctive and valuable literary magazines. We saw this year as a chance to correct that oversight. The range of writers he publishes is a sort of who's who of 20th/21st century serious writing, and he's found a way to keep reinventing it. The fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, and art is sometimes described as 'experimental,' but we would also say innovative, daring, indispensable, and beautiful. Our best writers manifestly trust Bradford Morrow with their most ambitious work, and we can think of no higher praise for a literary magazine, or its editor.”