John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York in 1927. His Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007) won the 2008 Griffin International Prize for Poetry. The Landscapist, his collected translations of the poetry of Pierre Martory, was published in 2008 by Sheep Meadow Press and was nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Poetry. The Library of America published the first volume of his Collected Poems in fall 2008. Planisphere, his latest volume of new poetry, will be published by Ecco/HarperCollins in December 2009.