Frank Bidart

Frank Bidart (born May 27, 1939 in Bakersfield, California) is an American academic and poet, and a three time Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry.

Bidart is a native of California and considered a career in acting or directing when he was young. In 1957, he began to study at the University of California at Riverside, where he was introduced to writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and started to look at poetry as a career path. He then went on to Harvard, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He began studying with Lowell and Reuben Brower in 1962.

He has been an English professor at Wellesley College since 1972, and has taught at nearby Brandeis University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he is openly gay. In his early work, he was noted for his dramatic monologue poems like "Ellen West" which Bidart wrote from the point of view of a woman with an eating disorder and "Herbert White" which he wrote from the point of view of a psychopath. He has also written openly about his family in the style of confessional poetry.

He co-edited the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell which was published in 2003 after years of working on the book's voluminous footnotes with his co-editor David Gewanter.

Bidart was the 2007 winner of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. His chapbook, Music Like Dirt, later included in the collection Star Dust, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His 2013 book "Metaphysical Dog" was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He currently maintains a strong working relationship with actor and fellow poet James Franco, with whom he collaborated during the making of Franco's short film "Herbert White" (2010), based on Bidart's poem of the same name.

• 1981 The Paris Review's first Bernard F. Conners Prize for "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky"
• 1992 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1997 Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America
• 2000 Wallace Stevens Award of The Academy of American Poets; subsequently elected a Chancellor of the Academy (2003)
• 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry
•  ???? Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer's Award
•  ???? Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Poetry), winner for Metaphysical Dog
• 2013 National Book Award (Poetry), finalist for Metaphysical Dog
• 2014 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

• "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved June 25, 2011. 
• Kirsten Reach (January 14, 2014). "NBCC finalists announced". Melville House Publishing. Retrieved January 14, 2014. 
• "Announcing the National Book Critics Awards Finalists for Publishing Year 2013". National Book Critics Circle. January 14, 2014. Retrieved January 14, 2014. 
• "National Book Critics Circle Announces Award Winners for Publishing Year 2013". National Book Critics Circle. March 13, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2014. 
• "2013 National Book Award Finalists Announced". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved January 31, 2017. 
• "2013 National Book Awards Winners and Finalists". National Book Foundation. January 14, 2014. Retrieved January 31, 2017. 
• Ron Charles (July 30, 2014). "Winners of the 2014 PEN Literary Awards". Washington Post. Retrieved August 1, 2014. 
• "2014 PEN/Voelcker Award". pen.org. Retrieved August 1, 2014. 
• John Williams (July 30, 2014). "James Wolcott and Frank Bidart Among 2014 PEN American Winners". New York Times. Retrieved August 1, 2014.