About
Hello, I'm Don.
I’m an American poet and translator, born in Nevada and raised (sort of) in California. After graduating from Cal State, Sacramento (M.F.A., 1978), where I had the good fortune of working with the poet Dennis Schmitz, and from the University of Montana (M.A., 1980), where I had the further good fortune of taking workshops with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees, I ran away to Greece and have lived here ever since.
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During my four decades in Greece, I’ve taught literature and creative writing at American, British and Greek universities, and traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East and farther afield.
Fluent in Greek, a citizen of both my homeland and my adopted country, I have published six collections of poetry—Of Dust, Approximately Paradise, Before Kodachrome, In Lands Imagination Favors, The Flow of Wonder and, most recently, A Different Heaven: New & Selected Poems. I have also translated the esteemed Greek poet Nikos Fokas, most prominently in The Known: Selected Poems (1981-2000), and have edited an anthology that grew out of my experience as an expatriate, Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece.
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My work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize; honored by (among others) Princeton University and the London Hellenic Society, as well as by such noted publications as Beloit Poetry Journal and Seneca Review; and shortlisted for the Walt Whitman Award, the Rubery Book Award and the Greek National Translation Award.
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And my greatest good fortune of all ... I live with my companion Aleka in both Athens and Thessaloniki.
Praise from Others
“Here’s a poetry that I admire: vernacular, intelligent, gritty, informed, deeply engaged in the life of the world, but still keeping a sly distance. Many poems from Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean cultures, knowledgeable, and at home. Poems of politics and power, of love, of community and family. Skepticism and hard-won wholeness.”
-- Gary Snyder on
Approximately Paradise
“Wherever the poem comes from—from the poet’s earthly place, I mean: say Nevada, Montana, Italy, Greece, Egypt, anywhere—in the case of Don Schofield’s work, the poem comes from somewhere the reader will recognize as implicitly true, minutely accurate, and abundantly beautiful. This is work by a man as in love with language as he is with the world and with this earth.”
-- Robert Wrigley on A Different Heaven: New & Selected Poems
“There are riches and surprises in these poems that place his work in the tradition of the fine contemporary Greek poets he has both celebrated and ably translated, though the voice that emerges in his most characteristic work is distinctly his own, as is the particular impulse that makes it sing.”
--Edmund Keeley on
Approximately Paradise
