Ben Downing (born April 17, 1967) is an American writer, editor, and teacher. Specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British social life and literature (with a particular emphasis on travel writing), he has written essays, articles, and reviews on figures such as Robert Louis Stevenson, [1] Duff Cooper, [2] Robert Byron, [3] Anthony Powell, [4] Peter Fleming, [5] Wilfred Thesiger, [6] and Patrick Leigh Fermor. [7] His biography of Janet Ross, who for many years was the doyenne of Florence’s Anglo-American colony, was published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [8]
Downing also writes poetry. His collection The Calligraphy Shop appeared in 2003, and he continues to publish poems in The Atlantic , [9] The New Criterion , [10] The Yale Review , [11] and elsewhere.
Since 1993 Downing has worked at Parnassus: Poetry in Review , of which he is currently the co-editor. [12] He has taught literary seminars and workshops at Columbia, [8] Bryn Mawr, [13] and the 92nd St. Y, [14] and he currently teaches a small private class, known as The English Salon, for advanced non-native speakers of English. He lives in New York City and graduated from Harvard University. [15]
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor was an English writer, scholar, soldier and polyglot. He played a prominent role in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War, and was widely seen as Britain's greatest living travel writer, on the basis of books such as A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once termed him "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene".
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued in 2018 that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century". She was also a painter, and her poetry is noted for its careful attention to detail; Ernest Hilbert wrote “Bishop’s poetics is one distinguished by tranquil observation, craft-like accuracy, care for the small things of the world, a miniaturist’s discretion and attention."
Richmond Alexander Lattimore was an American poet and classicist known for his translations of the Greek classics, especially his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey.
Frederick Seidel is an American poet.
Adam Nicolson, is an English author who has written about history, landscape, great literature and the sea. He is also the 5th Baron Carnock, but does not use the title.
Stuart Dybek is an American writer of fiction and poetry.
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His 77 Dream Songs (1964) won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg is an American poet.
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
Katharine Sergeant Angell White was an American writer and the fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 1960. In her obituary, printed in The New Yorker in 1977, William Shawn wrote, "More than any other editor except Harold Ross himself, Katharine White gave The New Yorker its shape, and set it on its course."
Artemis Cooper, Lady Beevor FRSL is a British writer, primarily of biographies. She is married to historian Sir Antony Beevor.
Jean Valentine was an American poet and the New York State Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. Her poetry collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
Station Island is the sixth collection of original poetry written by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. It is dedicated to the Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel. The collection was first published in the United Kingdom and Ireland in 1984 by Faber & Faber and was then published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1985. Seamus Heaney was recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.
Janet McDonald was an American writer of young adult novels as well as the author of Project Girl, a memoir about her early life in Brooklyn's Farragut Houses and struggle to achieve an Ivy League education. Her best known children's book is Spellbound, which tells the story of a teenaged mother who wins a spelling competition and a college scholarship. The book was named as one of the American Library Association's eighty-four Best Books for Young Adults in 2002.
Jane Alison is an Australian author.
Christian Wiman is an American poet, translator and editor.
Asali Solomon is an American professor, author, and novelist. She grew up in West Philadelphia, and attended Henry C. Lea Elementary, The Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Central High School. In 2007, she was named a 5 under 35 honoree.
Caroline Lucie "Lina" Waterfield OBE was an English author and Italian correspondent for The Observer and The Sunday Times. She founded the library which became the British Institute of Florence.
The Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive is a collection of over 10,000 items of correspondence, literary manuscripts, articles and research papers, diaries, passports, sketches and photographs relating to Sir Patrick 'Paddy' Leigh Fermor, a British author, scholar, veteran, and adventurer. The bulk of the collection, the Papers of Patrick Leigh Fermor, was purchased by the National Library of Scotland (NLS) in 2012 from Fermor's estate, using funds donated by the John R. Murray Charitable Trust, and is housed at the Library's main building on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was made available to the general public in November 2014.