Keith Waldrop

Bernard Keith Waldrop (December 11, 1932 – July 27, 2023) was an American poet, translator, publisher, and academic.

From 1953 to 1955, he served in the United States Army.

He was stationed in West Germany, where he met Rosmarie Sebald.

He received his bachelor's degree from the Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia State University) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Michigan (1958, 1964).

She emigrated to the United States and they were married in 1959.

In 1961, Waldrop and his wife, Rosmarie Waldrop, founded Burning Deck, a small press specializing in the publication of experimental poetry and prose.

The press was named after a line from the poem "Casabianca," by nineteenth-century poet Felicia Hemans.

The poem starts:

Keith Waldrop died in Providence, Rhode Island on July 27, 2023, at the age of 90.

From 1963 to 1964, while finishing his Ph.D., Waldrop worked as an instructor at Wayne State University, following which he was hired as a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University, where he taught between 1966-1967.

He was hired as a professor of English by Brown University in 1968, where he taught for the remainder of his career for both the English and Literary Arts departments.

He won the National Book Award for Poetry for his 2009 collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.

Bernard Keith Waldrop was born in Emporia, Kansas, to Arthur Waldrop, a railroad worker, and Opal (née Mohler), a piano teacher.

After forty-three years of teaching he retired in 2011.