Peter Filkins

Literature

Division: Languages and Literature

Appointment: 1988

Education:
B.A., Williams College; M.F.A., Columbia University.

Areas:
Writing, literature, and translation.

Positions:
Hiram College, North Adams State College, and Williams College.
Fulbright Fellow at the University of Vienna from 1983 to 1985.

Publications:
His translation of the complete poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Songs in Flight (Marsilio 1994), was named an outstanding translation of 1994 by the American Literary Translators Association. His first book of poems, What She Knew, appeared from Orchises Press in 1998, and his translation of a novel by Alois Hotschnig, Leonardo's Hands, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1999. In that same year, Northwestern University Press brought out his translation of two novel fragments by Bachmann titled The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. In 2002, his second book of poems, After Homer, appeared from George Braziller Publishers and in 2006 a second, expanded edition of Bachmann's poems, Darkness Spoken, was published by Zephyr Press. His poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in numerous journals, including the New Republic, the American Scholar, the New Criterion, Paris Review, Agni, the American Poetry Review, Partisan Review, the Iowa Review, the Literary Review, the Southwest Review, Verse, TriQuarterly, Poetry, the Massachusetts Review, Poetry Criticism, Contemporary Literary Criticism, USA Today, The World & I, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the New York Times Book Review.

Special Activities:
1981 to 1983 - Assistant editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review
1998 and 1999 - Service on the jury for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize awarded by the Goethe Institute of Chicago Coordinator of the Poetry & Fiction Reading Series at Bard College at Simon's Rock

Awards/Grants:
1989, 1993, 1997, and 2003 - Residencies at the Yaddo Artists Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony, respectively.
1997, 2003, and 2007 - Research grants by the Austrian Society for Literature and translation support grants by the Austrian Bundesministerium.
1998 - Finalist Award in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Commission. In spring of 2005 he was the Commerzbank Fellow at the
American Academy in Berlin while working on a translation of H.G. Adler's Eine Reise.

Contact Information:
Office: Hall College Center, 2nd floor
Phone: (413)-528-7222
Fax: (413)-528-7365
Email: pfilkins@simons-rock.edu