Pierre Joris

Pierre Joris was born in Strasbourg, France and raised in the town of Ettelbruck, Luxembourg. He lived throughout the United States, Europe, and North Africa.

A poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist, Joris published over eighty books across genres, including more than forty volumes of poetry. His last titles include Interglacial Narrows (Contra Mundum Press, 2023) and Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In‑between Mersch & Elsewhere (Contra Mundum Press, 2022), co-authored with Florent Toniello. Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000–2024, which Joris completed before his death in 2025, is the companion volume to Poasis: Selected Poems 1986–1999 (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Other collections include An American Suite (Inpatient Press, 2016), Barzakh: Poems 2000–2012 (Black Widow Press, 2014), Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj (Chax Press, 2013), Aljibar II (Editions PHI, 2008), and Aljibar (Editions PHI, 2007). He also published two volumes of essays, A Nomad Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990–2006 (Salt Publishing, 2009).

Joris’s editorial projects included the two-volume Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry (coedited with Jerome Rothenberg; University of California Press, 1995), as well as Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature (coedited with Habib Tengour; University of California Press, 2013). Also with Jerome Rothenberg, Joris coedited pppppp: Poems Performances Pieces Proses Plays Poetics by Kurt Schwitters (Exact Change, 2004), winner of the PEN Center USA West Literary Award for Translation, and Pabo Picasso: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & other poems (Exact Change, 2004).

Joris translated numerous authors into both English and French, including Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Habib Tengour, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Maurice Blanchot, and Edmond Jabès. He published numerous translations of the work of Paul Celan, including Breathturn, Lightduress, and Threadsuns, all published by Green Integer Books, Paul Celan: Selections (University of California Press, 2005), The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials (Stanford University Press, 2011), Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry by Paul Celan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), and Microliths They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose (Contra Mundum Press, 2020). In 2020, he received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and Luxembourg’s Batty Weber Lifetime Literary Achievement Prize.

From 1992 to 2013, Joris taught at SUNY, Albany. Joris lived in Brooklyn with his wife, the performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte. 

On February 26, 2025, Pierre Joris died in Brooklyn, New York.