James Richardson’s collections of poems, aphorisms, and ten-second essays are For Now; During, the winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America; By the Numbers, a National Book Award finalist; Interglacial, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; the “cult favorite” Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays; How Things Are, As If , recently reprinted in the Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporaries series; Second Guesses; and Reservations, a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. He is also the author of two critical studies, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity and Vanishing Lives: Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne and Yeats.

Richardson is the recipient of the Jackson Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Presidential Teaching Award from Princeton University, where he is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing. He lives on a wooded hillside near Princeton with his wife and first reader, the scholar-critic Constance W. Hassett, author of the go-to book on Christina Rossetti. They have two daughters, one a creative director/editor and poet, one a professor of criminal justice.

WITHIN THE HOUR: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms 1971-2026 will be published by Copper Canyon Press on September 15, 2026.