I. Biography: 

Allen Grossman was born in 1932 in Minneapolis Minnesota. He attended Harvard with interruptions from 1949-1956 (B.A., M.A.). He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1960. From 1957 to 1991 he taught at Brandeis where he was the Paul E. Prosswimmer Professor of Poetry and General Education. In 1971 he was a visiting Professor in the Universitat HaNegev in Beersheba, Israel. In 1991 he became the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University where he now teaches in the English Department. 

At Harvard he received the Garrison Award for Poetry and the Prize of the American Academy of Poetry. He has also received the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club, three Pushcart Prizes (1975, 1987, 1990), the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim (1982), and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1985). In 1987 he received the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize in Poetry of Wellesley College, and in 1988 the Sheaffer-PEN/Nex England Award for Literary Distinction. He is included in Scribner's Best Poems for 1988 (ed. Ashbery), 1991 (ed. (Simic), 1992 (ed. Strand), 1993 (ed. Gluck). In August 1989 he received a John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Fellowship Prize to continue for a period of five years. In 1990, the Bassine 
Citation of the Academy of American Poets. In 1992 his book, The Ether Dome, was a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. 

In 1993 he was elected Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Science.

His teaching has been primarily in the area of poetry, poetics, and general education. In 1979 he devised and put in place (with others) a General Education Program at 
Brandeis University and served for some years as Director in the Humanities Division of that program. In 1965 he received the A. B. Cohen Award for Teaching at Brandeis, and in 1982 the Brandeis University Distinguished Service Award. In 1987 he was the CASE Massachusetts State Professor of the Year and National Gold Medalist.
 

II. Publications: Poetry (excluding publications in periodicals, anthologies, etc.): 

1. A Harlot's Hire (Cambridge, Mass.: Boars Head Press, 1959). 

2. The Recluse (Cambridge, Mass.: Pym-Randall Press, 1965). 

3. And The Dew Lay All Night Upon My Branch (Lexington, Mass.: Aleph Press, 1974). 

4. The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River (New York: New Directions, 1979). 

5. Of The Great House (New York: New Directions, 1982) 

6. The Bright Nails Scattered on the Ground (New York: New Directions, 1986). 

7. The Ether Dome and Other Poems New and Selected (1979-1990). 
(New York: New Directions, Fall 1991). 

8. The Song of the Lord (Watershed, 1991). An audiotape where the author reads poems selected from The Ether Dome.

9.  How to Do Things with Tears (New York:  New Directions, 2001).

10.  Sweet Youth (New York:  New Directions, 2002).
 
 III. Some Recent Publications: Prose

1. The Sighted Singer Two Works on Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)  Contains (Part II):  "Summa Lyrica:  A Primer of the Common Places in Speculative Poetics".

2. The Long Schoolroom:  Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle (University of Michigan Press, 1997).

3.  "The Passion of Laocoon:  Warfare of the Religious Against the Poetic Institution" in Western Humanities Review, Vol LVI Number 2 Fall 2002, pp. 30-80.

4.  "Wordworth's 'The Solitary Reaper':  Notes on Poiesis, Pastoral, and Institution",  TriQuarterly 116, Summer 2003.