A. F. Moritz’s Bio

A. F. Moritz. Photographer: Steve Payne.

A. F. Moritz
Photographer: Steve Payne

ALBERT F. MORITZ (A. F. Moritz) is the author of 20 books of poetry. His poetry has received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Award, selection to the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, and three nominations as finalist volumes for the Governor General’s Award, among other recognitions.

His most recent books are The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018) and Sequence: a Poem (2015), both from House of Anansi Press, and the 2015 re-publication by Princeton University Press of his 1986 volume, The Tradition.

In 2009, for his collection The Sentinel (2008), he was the recipient of the Griffin Prize, the world’s largest and one of its most prestigious awards for a volume of English-language poetry. He has also won the ReLit Award for Night Street Repairs (2004), which in 2010 was named one of 39 “books of the decade” by the Toronto Globe and Mail. His 2012 collection The New Measures received the League of Canadian Poets’ book-of-the-year award, the Raymond Souster Prize, and was also a finalist for Canada’s national literary prize, the Governor General’s Award, as were The Sentinel in 2008 and Rest on the Flight into Egypt in 1999.

Moritz’s poems have appeared regularly in a variety of widely known journals: Poetry, The Hudson Review, The American Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, The Yale Review, The Southwest Review, The Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, The Partisan Review, Agni, The Partisan Review, Poetry East, Queen’s Quarterly, Commonweal, The Walrus and many others, as well as occasionally in magazines in Europe and Latin America. In the U.K., his poems have appeared recently in several numbers of The High Window. His work have been included in several editions of the annual anthologies The Best Canadian Poetry and The Best American Poetry, including in The Best of the Best American Poetry, ed. Harold Bloom, and The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, ed. Molly Peacock and Anita Lahey.

A Canadian citizen, Moritz was born in Ohio and moved to Canada in 1974 for reasons of education.

 

To listen to Albert’s reading at the Atwater Poetry Project, click here.