Rod Jellema

Rod Jellema is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, where he was the founding director of the Creative Writing Program. He is the author of five books of poems: Incarnality: The Collected Poems (2010), A Slender Grace (2004), The Eighth Day (1984), The Lost Faces (1979), and Something Tugging the Line (1974). He studied the language of his forbears by editing and translating two Frisian-English bilingual books, The Sound that Remains (1990), and Country Fair (1985). He is the only American to have been awarded Fryslân’s highest literary award, the Pieter Jelles Prize.

Jellema was twice awarded writer’s fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a writer-in-residence at Yaddo multiple times. Other awards include the Towson University Prize for Literature, a Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and a Columbia University Translation Prize.