Poet, translator, critic, essayist, and biographer Peter Filkins was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He has published four collections of poetry: What She Knew (1998), After Homer (2002), Augustine’s Vision (2010), and The View We’re Granted (2012), co-winner of the Sheila Motton Best Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. He is also the translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken (2006); H.G. Adler’s novels The Journey (2008), Panorama (2011), and The Wall (2014); and the author of a biography, H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds (2019).
Filkins has been awarded the Stover Prize in Poetry from Southwest Review and the New American Press Chapbook Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Yaddo, MacDowell, the James Merrill House, and the American Academy in Berlin. Filkins serves as the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock since 1989 and teaches translation at the main campus of Bard College since 2006.