- Born: December 8, 1943
- Birthplace: Kansas City, MO
James Tate is an award-winning poet, noted for his work's surreal imagery, lyricism and irony. Tate got his bachelor's degree from Kansas State College in 1965 and his master's from the University of Iowa in 1967. That same year his first collection of poetry, The Lost Pilot, was published as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He went on to publish some two dozen books of verse. His Selected Poems won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Worshipful Company of Fletchers won the 1994 National Book Award.
Tate is a professor at the University of Massachusetts. His novel Lucky Darryl was published in 1977. He also has a collection of short stories, Hottentot Ossuary (1974), and he edited The Best American Poetry 1997. Among the other honors he has received are a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Tate is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.Most Famous Works
- The Lost Pilot (1967)
- Absences (1972)
- River Doggeries (1979)
- Distance from Loved Ones (1990)
- Selected Poems (1991)
- Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994)
- Shroud of the Gnome (1997)
- Memoir of the Hawk (2001)
- Return to the City of White Donkeys (2004)
