Jay Parini was born in 1948 in Pittston, Pennsylvania, and he was raised in Scranton. He graduated from both Lafayette College and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he received a Ph.D. in 1975.
His six books of poetry include New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015 and The Art of Subtraction. He has written eight novels, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Damascus Road, The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of H.M., and The Last Station – the latter was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer and translated into over thirty languages. He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Jesus, and Gore Vidal. His nonfiction works include The Art of Teaching, Why Poetry Matters, Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America, and The Way of Jesus. His most recent book, Borges and Me: An Encounter, is a memoir that will be released in August of 2020.
Among his many edited volumes are the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (2004), The Columbia History of American Poetry (1994), The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry (1995), and The Norton Book of American Autobiography (1998).
The recipient of honorary degrees from Lafayette College, the University of Scranton, and Sewanee: The University of the South, he has received various fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993-1994) and, for his Frost biography, the Chicago Tribune-Heartland Award in 2000. He was the Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford University, in 1993-1994 and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London in 2005-2006.
His books have been translated in more than thirty languages, and he writes articles and reviews for many publications, including The Guardian and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He also contributes op-ed pieces to various websites, including CNN, Salon, and The Daily Beast.
Parini adapted his Gore Vidal biography with director Michael Hoffman into a feature film, starring Kevin Spacey and Michael Stuhlbarg. Adaptations of Benjamin’s Crossing, The Damascus Road, and Borges and Me are currently underway.
He lives in Weybridge, Vermont, where he has been on the faculty at Middlebury College since 1982. He is married to Devon Jersild, a clinical psychologist and writer, and they have three sons.