James Tate (writer) - Career

Career

Tate has taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has worked since 1971. He is a member of the poetry faculty at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers, along with Dara Wier and Peter Gizzi.

Dudley Fitts selected Tate's first book of poems, The Lost Pilot (1967) for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Fitts praised Tate's writing for its "natural grace." James Tate's first volume of poetry, Cages, was published by Shepherd's Press. Iowa City, 1966.

Tate won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award in 1991 for his Selected Poems.

In 1994, he won the National Book Award for his poetry collection, Worshipful Company of Fletchers.

Tate's writing style is often described as surrealistic, comic, and absurdist. His work has captivated other poets as diverse as John Ashbery and Dana Gioia. Regarding his own work, Tate has said, "My characters usually are—or, I’d say most often, I don’t want to generalize too much—but most often they’re in trouble, and they’re trying to find some kind of life." This view is supported by the poet Tony Hoagland's observation that, "His work of late has been in prose poems, in which his picaresque speaker or characters are spinning through life, inquisitive and clueless as Candide, trying to identify and get with the fiction of whatever world they are in."

In addition to many books of poetry, he has published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (2001) and The Route as Briefed (1999).

Some of his additional awards not already mentioned include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.