Mary Ann Caws

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and has taught at Barnard College, Princeton University, and the Université de Paris at Jussieu. She has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Getty Fellowships, experienced (delightfully) two residences at Bellagio, and served as the President of the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. She has published a series of illustrated biographies: on Dora Maar (Picasso's Weeping Woman), on Virginia Woolf, on Marcel Proust, on Pablo Picasso (particularly in his relation to poets), and on Henry James, and writes mostly about the subject of art and text (The Eye in the Text; Robert Motherwell with Pen and Brush; Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing). She has published a memoir (To the Boathouse), written on and translated French poets (André Breton, Yves Bonnefoy, René Char, Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, Tristan Tzara) and found herself Surprised in Translation.  For some odd reason, she enjoys editing anthologies (The Harper Collins World Reader; Surrealist Painters and Poets; Surrealist Love Poems; Surrealism; and The Yale Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry).

 

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