Wesleyan University Press is virtually celebrating what would have been Joseph Ceravolo 87th birthday! Ceravolo began writing poetry in 1957 while serving in the US Army in Germany. After earning a degree in civil engineering, Ceravolo studied poetry with Kenneth Koch at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Often associated with poets in the New York School such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, Ceravolo’s collections include Fits of Dawn (1965), Millennium Dust (1982), and The Green Lake is Awake (1994), among others. He was the first recipient of the Frank O’Hara Award. Ron Silliman notes that Ceravolo’s later work reveals him to be “one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation.”

To read Ceravolo’s work, we direct you to Collected Poems, edited by his wife Rosemary Ceravolo and former Wesleyan University Press editor Parker Smathers; published by Wesleyan University Press in 2013.