Dan Chiasson
Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country's most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature and Chair of the English Department at Wellesley College.
Chiasson is the author of seven books: The Afterlife of Objects, Natural History, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, Where's the Moon, There's the Moon, Bicentennial and The Math Campers. In February of 2026, Alfred A. Knopf will publish Chiasson's nonfiction book, Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People's Politician, based in part on his own early memories of Mayor Sanders.
Bernie for Burlington is a both "biography of Bernie's political rise" and a memoir of what Chiasson calls "a very unusual American experiment, a modern city run by a charismatic socialist and his smart, young administration, during the eight years when Ronald Reagan was in the White House." Chiasson added "I'm actually one of the outcomes of the experiment, and so is my book, looking back on the transformation of Burlington and the thrilling rise of Bernie and his ideas." Nicholson Baker called it "a book we need right now," a "big, lovingly-woven, Whitmanesque wicker work of grievances and glories, home truths and triumphs." Robert Pinsky praised its "wild variety of stories, voices and characters," and added "Dan Chiasson of Burlington, Vermont and American poetry is a masterful narrator."
Life
Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont. He grew up in the city of Burlington as the only child of his single mother. He attended Catholic schools, Mater Christi School and Rice Memorial High School, from which he graduated in 1989. He graduated summa cum laude in Classics and English from Amherst College, and from Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in English and was awarded the Whiting Foundation Award in the Humanities.In addition to teaching at Wellesley, Chiasson has been affiliated with Boston University's Master of Fine Arts program, with NYU's program in Paris, France, and with the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Environmental Conference in Ripton, Vermont. He was a 2017 in Stonington, CT. He lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.
Chiasson is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He was the poetry editor, and later advisory editor, of the Paris Review. His poems have been translated into many languages, including German by Jan Wagner. His Natural History was published as Naturgeschichte at Luxbooks, a publishing house focused on American poetry in bilingual editions. In the UK, he is published by Bloodaxe Books.
He is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.
Honors and awards
- 2008 Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters
- 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry
- 2004 Whiting Award
Poetry
| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected |
| The anatomy of melancholy | 2001 | ||
| Nocturne | 2001 | ||
| From 'The Names of 1,001 Strangers' | 2017 | ||
| Obituary | 2014 | ||
| Self | 2000 | ||
| Swifts | 2008 |
Criticism
;Notes