The Stars, the Snow, the Fire

John Haines, poet, essayist, and teacher, was born in 1924 in Norfolk, Virginia. After studying painting in Washington D.C. and New York City, he homesteaded, from 1954 to 1969, in Alaska, at Mile 68 Richardson Highway, southeast of Fairbanks. Mr. Haines is the author of numerous collections of poems and critical essays, among which the most recent are Fables and Distances, New and Selected Essays (1996); A Guide to the Four-Chambered Heart (1996); The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, Collected Poems (1993, expanded paperback edition 1996); and a memoir, The Stars, The Snow, The Fire (1989). A collection of early poems, At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-54, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 1997.

In addition to two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships for poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship previously granted, Mr. Haines received a Literary Award in 1995 from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and, in 1996, he was the guest lecturer at the Annual Summer Wordsworth Conference in Grasmere, England. Recent academic appointments include those at Ohio University, George Washington University, and University of Cincinnati. He occupied the Chair in Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee in 1993, and, in 1997, he was awarded the annual fellowship of the Academy of American Poets.

He passed away in 2011, at the age of 86.