Robert Hass

Miriam Berkley

Robert Hass—poet, critic, and teacher—is one of the most renowned figures of modern American literature, serving as the poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Award and shared the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Hass is also the author of Field Guide (1972), Praise (1979), Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2018), among other works. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Saint Mary’s College of California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished professor in poetry and poetics until his retirement in 2019.

Awards and Honors

Former U.S. Poet Laureate

National Book Award Winner, Time and Materials

Pulitzer Prize Winner, Time and Materials

Winner of the 2018 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, A Little Book on Form

Winner of the 2013 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, What Light Can Do