Ned Balbo

Ned Balbo grew up on Long Island, New York and is married to poet and essayist Jane Satterfield. He is also an adoptee whose background informs his creative work. His newest books are The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots, winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and 3 Nights of the Perseids, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, both published in 2019.

Morri Creech writes, "In the Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots, Ned Balbo ranges from the grave to the celebratory, from epithalamium to elegy, from spiritual yearning to earthly delight....Delivered with a deftness of phrasing and a formal precision that are rare in contemporary poetry, this is a rich and compelling book of poems."

Erica Dawson writes, "Read each poem again and again and watch them come together in a feverish mix of praise and anger, of sparks and a world often dark in its emptiness. Balbo welcomes us into the chaos but leaves us calm with the certainty that we all have the ability to find ourselves back in the light. 3 Nights of the Perseids is an amazing book."

2016's Upcycling Paumanok (Measure Press) uses popular culture and mid-century memory to explore "the vital history of one of the crucial American places," according to poet Mark Jarman. At the same time, V. Penelope Pelizzon observes, Ned is "unafraid of examining subjects closer to the heart," including love, parenthood, and friendship. It is, writes David Yezzi, "a splendid collection."

Ned's previous book, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, received the Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize. His second book, Lives of the Sleepers, was awarded the Ernest Sandeen Prize and a ForeWord Book of the Year Gold Medal, and his first, Galileo’s Banquet, shared the Towson University Prize.

Ned's poetry, prose, and translations appear widely in print and on-line. Anthology appearances include work in the Everyman’s Library volumes Villanelles and Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman (both from Knopf), Air Fare: Stories, Poems, and Essays on Flight (Sarabande), and Drawn to Marvel: poems from the comic books (Minor Arcana). His poems have been featured online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry column.

Ned holds degrees from Vassar College, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was recently a visiting faculty member in Iowa State University's MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment.