Jonas Zdanys

Jonas Zdanys (born July 30, 1950) is a bilingual poet, a leading translator of modern Lithuanian fiction and poetry into the English language., and a literary theorist whose writings on translation theory reinforce a conservative humanistic literary agenda.

He was born in New Britain, Connecticut, in 1950, a few months after his parents arrived in the United States from a United Nations camp for Lithuanian refugees.

He is a graduate of Yale University and earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he studied with Robert Creeley among other writers.

Zdanys is the author of fifty-six books.

Fifty of them are collections of his own poetry, written in English or in Lithuanian, and of his translations of Lithuanian poetry and prose into English.

His Lithuanian language poetry has been described as the product and result of his effort to bring to Lithuanian letters a modern, multidimensional-chaotic consciousness.

Zdanys is also active as a literary editor and has served as General Editor of Lituanus, The Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences (1976–1996); a Member of the Editorial Board of PEN of Lithuania; Consulting Editor of Contemporary East European Poetry; and a Reader for the Creative Writing Fellowship Program of the National Endowment for the Arts.

He held administrative and faculty positions at Yale University from 1980 to 1998, where he began and taught the poetry translation workshop, and served as the State of Connecticut's Chief Academic Officer and as Associate Commissioner of Higher Education (1998–2009).

He serves currently as Poet in Residence and Professor Emeritus of English at Sacred Heart University.

Zdanys has received a number of prizes and book awards for his own poetry and for his translations of Lithuanian poetry, including Lithuania’s Jotvingiai Prize, a major Lithuanian prize for poetry awarded by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture.

He was awarded the prize for his collection of poetry, written in Lithuanian, Dūmų Stulpai (Pillars of Smoke), published in May 2002 by the Lithuanian Writers Union Publishing House.

Zdanys was recognized, too, for two additional books published that year: Five Lithuanian Women Poets, his translation into English of poems by Lithuania’s leading women poets, and Inclusions in Time, his translation into English of poems by Lithuanian poet Antanas A. Jonynas.

Zdanys was nominated in 2023 for the Lithuanian National Prize in culture and the Arts, and was honored with an exhibition about his life and literary work by the National Library of Lithuania on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday: He has also been awarded the Lithuanian Writers Union Prize for Translation in 1996 for his book Four Poets of Lithuania; the Lithuanian Writers’ Society Prize for Best Book of the Year in 1994 for Aušros Daina (Aurora’s Song), a volume of his poetry in Lithuanian; and the Phillips Poetry Award and the Weinstein Memorial Creative Writing Award for his English-language poems.

He also was selected as Finalist for the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry for Water Light, a volume of his selected poems.

Zdanys has also received various grants in support of his literary work, among them awards from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the International Research and Exchanges Board with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council on Russian and East European Studies of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Lietuviškos Knygos/Books From Lithuania, and the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture.

* * The Mirror at the Top of the Stairs (Brooklyn: Black Spruce Press 2023).

Zdanys is also the author of some forty articles and papers, mostly on various topics on Lithuanian literature and translation theory.