Paul Mariani

Paul Mariani (born 1940 in New York City) is an American poet and is University Professor Emeritus at Boston College.

Paul Mariani is the University Professor Emeritus at Boston College, specializing in Modern American and British Poetry, religion and literature, and creative writing (memoir, biography, and poetry).

Born February 29, 1940 in Astoria, Queens, he grew up in New York City and Long Island and is the oldest of seven children.

He was educated at Chaminade, Beacon Marianist Prep, Mineola High School, Manhattan College, Colgate University, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where his mentor was the Dante scholar, Allen Mandelbaum.

He taught at Colgate University (1963), Hunter College (1964–1967), Lehman College (1965-1966) and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (1966–1968).

From 1968 until 2000 he taught poetry and literature at the University of Massachusetts and was a Distinguished University Professor.

In addition he taught at the Bread Loaf School of English in the 1980s and at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference from 1982 until 1996, and then for the Image conferences in Colorado Springs, Santa Fe, Whidbey Island, and Mount Holyoke.

Mariani has lectured and given readings widely in the United States and abroad and has published over 250 essays, introductions, chapters in anthologies and scholarly encyclopedias, and reviews, as well as being the author of 20 books.

These include biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens.

His biography of Williams was a finalist for the National Book Award.

He has published eight volumes of poetry, most recently Ordinary Time: Poems (Slant Books), and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernism (Paraclete Press) as well as commentaries on Hopkins, Williams, and many others.

He is also the author of Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius.

His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and several National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships.

From 2000 until his retirement he taught poetry and literature at Boston College and held a Chair as the University Professor of English.

He has taught poetry workshops at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Glen Workshops, and, in 2009, he received the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry.

James Franco's film biopic of Hart Crane, The Broken Tower, released in 2012, is based on Mariani's biography of the same title.

In September 2019 he was presented with the inaugural Flannery O’Connor Lifetime Achievement Award at the Catholic Imagination Conference held at Loyola University Chicago.