Poetry. Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1942. A member of the Tulsa School of Poets, he received his B.A. from Columbia College in 1964, the same year he won the Gotham Bookmart Avant-Garde Poetry Prize. He spent 1965-1966 in Paris on a Fulbright. Since 1969 he has been associated with Teachers & Writers Collaborative and numerous Poets in the Schools programs. In 1974-1976 he worked as a Writer in the Community in Lancaster, South Carolina. Since then he has directed the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York, which has been home base for him, his wife and son. His publications include "Great Balls of Fire," "Toujours l'amour," and "Triangles in the Afternoon" (poetry), "Bean Spasms," "The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Jim and Ron, " and "Antlers in the Treetops" (collaborations), as well as translations of Apollinaire, Duchamp, Cendrars and Larbaud. He is co-director of Full Court Press.
Ron Padgett is a poet and translator whose Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2014 Los Angeles Times Prize for the best poetry book. Padgett has translated the poetry of Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Valery Larbaud, and Blaise Cendrars.