Geoffrey Brock is an American poet and translator. His second book of poems, Voices Bright Flags, was selected by Heather McHugh as the ninth winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize; it will be published by Waywiser Press in the fall of 2014. His first book, Weighing Light, received the New Criterion Poetry Prize and appeared in 2005. Poems from these collections originally appeared in journals including Poetry, The New England Review, Subtropics, Cincinnati Review, Hudson Review, and elsewhere. Many have also appeared in anthologies such as The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, Best American Poetry 2007, and Pushcart Prize XXXIV. He has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford’s Wallace Stegner program, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers.
Brock has also received several major awards as a translator, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of his 2012 anthology, The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in support of his translation of Cesare Pavese’s Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950. The latter went on to receive translation prizes from the MLA and the PEN Center USA and was named a “Best Book of 2003″ by The Los Angeles Times. His prose translations include Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Roberto Calasso’s K., and Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (which received the Lewis Galantière Translation Award from the American Translators Association). He is currently translating the selected poems of Giovanni Pascoli, one of which received the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine.
Brock was born in Atlanta, grew up in Tallahassee FL, and has lived in Italy, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Gainesville FL, Overland Park KS, Dallas, San Francisco, and Tucson. He earned a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida, and was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford from 2002–2004. Since 2006 he has taught in the Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing & Translation in Fayetteville, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Padma Viswanathan, their two children, and a variable number of animals.