David Ferry | |
---|---|
Born |
Orange, New Jersey |
March 5, 1924
Occupation | Poet, professor |
Language | English |
Nationality | United States |
Alma mater |
Amherst College; Harvard University |
Genre | poetry |
Notable awards |
Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; National Book Award |
Spouse | Anne Ferry |
David Ferry is an American poet, translator, and educator. He has published eight collections of his poetry and a volume of literary criticism. He won the National Book Award for Poetry for his 2012 collection Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations.
Ferry was born in Orange, New Jersey, and grew up and attended Columbia High School amid the “wild hills” of suburban Maplewood, New Jersey. His undergraduate education at Amherst College was interrupted by his service in the United States Army Air Force during World War II. He ultimately received his B.A. from Amherst in 1946. He went on to earn his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and it was during his graduate studies that he published his first poems in The Kenyon Review.
From 1952 until his retirement in 1989, Ferry taught at Wellesley College where he was, for many years, the chairman of the English Department. He now holds the title Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley. He has also taught writing at Boston University, as well as Suffolk University, as a distinguished scholar. Ferry was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998, and he is a fellow of the Academy of American Poets.
In 1958, Ferry married the distinguished literary scholar Anne Ferry (died 2006), they had two children, Elizabeth, an anthropologist, and Stephen, a photojournalist. Before moving to his current home in Brookline, Massachusetts, Ferry lived across the Charles River in Cambridge, in the house where 19th century journalist and women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller lived before she joined the Brook Farm community.