Steven Cramer

Steven Cramer is the author of seven poetry collections: The Eye That Desires to Look Upward (Galileo Press, 1987); The World Book (Copper Beech Press, 1992); Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (Lumen Editions/Brookline Books, 1997); Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the 2005 Sheila Motton Book Prize and named an Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; Clangings (Sarabande Books, 2012); Listen (MadHat Press, 2020); and Departures from Rilke (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).

Cramer has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In addition to journals such as AGNI, Field, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, and Poetry magazine, his work is included in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Autumn House Press, 2005), Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry (Autumn House Press, 2007), Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008), two volumes of the Plume Anthology of Poetry, The Poetry Anthology 1912–2002 (Ivan R. Dee, 2003), and Villanelles (Knopf, 2012). Cramer has also written reviews and essays for Atlantic Unbound, Harvard Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. 

Cramer was born in Orange, New Jersey, and educated at Antioch College and the University of Iowa. He founded and currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Lesley University.