Bill Berkson
Bio
Bill Berkson is a poet, art critic, editor, and curator who has been active in the art and poetry worlds for five decades. He is the author of eighteen books and pamphlets of poetry, including most recently Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems, Gloria (with etchings by Alex Katz), Goods and Services, and Lady Air, as well as an epistolary collaboration by Bernadette Mayer entitled What's Your Idea of a Good Time? He is a corresponding editor for Art in America, and his criticism has appeared there and in Artforum and other journals. A collection of his essays, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings, appeared in 2004, Sudden Address: Selected Lectures in 2007, and a new collection of art writings For the Ordinary Artist will appear later this year, as will Not an Exit, a suite of poems with drawings by Léonie Guyer. He was Distinguished Paul Mellon Fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture for 2006 and was awarded the 2008 Goldie for Literature from the Bay Guardian and the 2010 Balcones Prize for Poetry. Berkson taught literature and art history at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1984 to 2008.
