Degrees and Studies: M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University School of Arts and Sciences, in English and Comparative Literature; M.F.A. in writing, prosody, translation, Columbia University School of the Arts; Certificate in language instruction, The New School for Social Research; Post-Bac in Studio Art and Film, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. BA, magna cum laude with honors and the Kaufmann Prize (awarded to one graduating English major), Williams College and Cambridge University; Diplome de Civilisation Francaise, Sorbonne, Extension Universitaire.

Stephen Massimilla’s fields of interest include
19th- and 20th-/21st-century fiction, poetry, and poetics; Romanticism; Core Curriculum (surveys of myth, epic, drama, and philosophy, Western and non-Western traditions); Postmodernism and Postcolonialism; poetry writing; nonfiction writing; translation; and film. As the former co-manager of an art gallery who has worked as a mural painter, a translator, and a photography book reviewer, as well as an editor at Art in America and elsewhere, Massimilla has lately been interested in exploring the interrelationship between different arts, genres, and languages. His current project focuses on connections between lyric poetry, food writing, and the culinary arts, and he has also written extensively on the role of myth and allusions to antiquity in modernist literature. He has written on Homer, Dante, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Nietzsche, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, W.C. Williams, Lorca, Walcott, contemporary poetry, Bergman, and Freud.

Massimilla’s latest poetry book, The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (2013), was selected for publication in the Stephen F. Austin State University Press Poetry Series Prize Competition. His collection Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera, CUNY, 2002) received the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Bordighera Prize and was translated into Italian by Luigi Bonaffini; his sonnet sequence Later on Aiaia (2001) received the Grolier Poetry Prize; his volume Almost a Second Thought was runner-up for the Salmon Run National Poetry Book Award judged by X.J. Kennedy. Other work received a Van Rennselaer Award judged by Kenneth Koch, an Academy of American Poets prize, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.

Massimilla’s articles, poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including AGNI, the APR, The American Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Ariel, Review of International English Literature, Barrow Street, The Bitter Oleander, Chelsea, Colorado Review, The Cream City Review, Confrontation, Denver Quarterly, Descant, Epoch, Fulcrum, Green Mountains Review, The Greensboro Review, High Plains Literary Review, The Marlboro Review, Natural Bridge, Provincetown Arts Magazine, The Southern Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Tampa Review, Quarterly West, Verse Daily, and such anthologies as Meridian Poetry Anthology, When Icarus Falls, Token Entry: New York City Subway Poems, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, New Hungers for Old: One Hundred Years of Italian-American Poetry, and the recently released Tupelo Press anthology Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems.

Massimilla has been interviewed on public radio and television, presented papers at numerous conferences, and performed his work at many venues, including Carnegie Hall. He teaches or has taught courses in literary classics, modernist/postmodernist poetry and novels, poetry writing, American literature, the philosophy of values, myth, composition, ESL, and other subjects at Columbia University, The New School, Barnard College, the 92nd Street Y, the Juilliard School, the School of Visual Arts, and elsewhere. Massimilla has also completed hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings, a portion of which he has exhibited in galleries in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.

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