Career Summary

Timothy Steele has published four collections of verse: Uncertainties and Rest (1979); Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986); The Color Wheel (1994); and Toward the Winter Solstice (2006). The first two collections were republished in 1995 in a joint volume entitled Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986. He has written well as two books about poetry and literary history, Missing Measures (1990) and All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing (1999) and has also edited The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (1997). His honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University; a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; the Los Angeles PEN Center's Literary Award for Poetry; and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for the Study of Prosody. An emeritus professor of English at Cal State L.A., he has received the university’s two highest teaching honors: Outstanding Professor and President's Distinguished Professor.

Online Resources

• Academy of American Poets Profile. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1550

• "An Interview with Timothy Steele." Interview with Kevin Durkin for Able Muse, April 2000. http://www.ablemuse.com/2k/kdurkin-steele.htm

• Poetry Foundation Profile. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6533#further

• August Kleinzahler and Timothy Steele Reading at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/93842254/

• Interview with and reading for NPR's BirdNote. https://www.birdnote.org/listen/birdnote-presents/poetry-steele

• Reading  and discussion with Catherine Tufariello and Al Basile for Poems On: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCT-Y2n-1k8