“Lloyd Schwartz’s writing displays a peculiar combination of gifts — observation of personality; loving attention to homely turns of language, neglected as stray cats; a moral generosity that cannot be called ‘forgiving’ because it declines to condemn in the first place; a way of being funny that in the old distinction favors humor over comedy; and above all, an intense vocality.”
Lloyd Schwartz
Lloyd Schwartz’s poetry collections include These People (1981), Goodnight, Grace (1992), Cairo Traffic (2000), and, most recently, Little Kisses (2017). His poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. Author Roger Rosenblatt calls him “A major poet with a gentle comic soul.” Poet James Merrill has described his work as “the Chapliniana of our later, darker day.” And Times Literary Supplement has praised him for “how powerfully [his] verse can still deliver the idioms and nuances of American speech.” In Salmagundi, poet Peter Campion wrote that “Schwartz does what should make any reader or fellow poet grateful: he enlarges the range of living speech as artwork.” He is also a noted Elizabeth Bishop scholar, co-editor of the Library of American’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters, and editor of the centennial edition of Bishop’s prose. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his columns on music in The Boston Phoenix. Since 1987, he has been the classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. He is currently the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
