James Tate once said, in a Paris Review interview, "I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best.”
Born in 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri, Tate won the 1967 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for his first book The Lost Pilot. He wrote nineteen full-length books of poetry along with many chapbooks, collections of prose, collaborations, and a novel. His Selected Poems won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award. In 1994, Worshipful Company of Fletchers won the National Book Award. Tate taught for many years in the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers. In 2004, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 2023, Ecco HarperCollins brought out Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate.
He always carried a camera, taking photos of everything around him. These photos, along with audio and video readings, interviews, a bibliography of his library, and media created by others, are collected on this website.
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