Gerald Stern’s recent books of poetry are Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992; Save the Last Dance; This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy; and Bread without Sugar. His collection of essays What I Can't Bear Losing was published in 2009. His honors include the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005 Stern was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. For many years a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stern now lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.