Main Content
Richard Jones is a poet, editor, and professor of English at DePaul University. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including Country of Air, At Last We Enter Paradise, A Perfect Time, and Apropos of Nothing. His selected poems, The Blessing, won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry in 2000. For thirty-five years he has been the editor of Poetry East, an award-winning literary journal which celebrates poetry, translation, and art from around the world. Among the many Poetry East anthologies he has edited are Bliss, The Last Believer in Words, Origins, and Paris.
When asked about his teaching, Richard Jones says, “Writing poetry can be a hard and humbling discipline—an art that demands great erudition and mastery, and which tests the will and the imagination. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke framed the challenge of poetry: “You must change your life.” And so poetry assaults complacency, insensitivity, and arrogance. Ordinary wisdom tells us to hurry blindly through our day; poetry asks that we slow down, listen, and regard all that which is marvelous, both the insignificant as well as the divine.”