Jay Parini

Jay Parini (born 1948) is an American writer and academic. He is known for novels and poetry, biography and criticism.

He was born in Pittston, Pennsylvania, and brought up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Lafayette College in 1970 and was awarded a doctorate by the University of St. Andrews in 1975. He taught at Dartmouth College from 1975 to 1982, and has taught since 1982 at Middlebury College, where he is the D.E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College, a liberal arts college in Savannah that was founded in February, 2010. He is married to the writer and psychologist Devon Jersild; they have three sons.

Parini is a regular contributor to various journals and newspapers, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian (U.K.). His poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Poetry.

Parini's 1990 international best-selling novel The Last Station was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film that was released in December 2009. In writing biographical fiction (such as The Last Station and The Passages of H.M.), Parini engages in extensive historical research.

Parini was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. He was Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1993–1994. He was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London in 2005–2006.