John Maynard

John Maynard is a poet, biographer, critic, and theorist. He is Professor of English Emeritus at NYU. He taught earlier at Harvard and was Chair of his Department at NYU for six years. He has published five non-fiction books, including three with Harvard and Cambridge, and many articles and has done a great deal of editing, including co-editing a journal with Cambridge for 26 years. He won the Thomas J. Wilson Prize of Harvard University Press for his first book. He was awarded a Guggenheim and also a NEH Grant; recently he was given an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who's Who. He is a member of PEN.

During most of his adult life, he wrote some poems and planned to write more at retirement. He has been editing these poems for three years. Of these, one, Armando and Maisie, has been published in 2025; another, What's It Like To Be Old, appeared in winter 2026; Being in Time and Change is appearing this fall; three volumes, Political Poems, Seasons: Moments, and A dog in Central Park have been accepted for publication. Armando and Maisie won the Chrysalis Brew Project's Book Excellence Award for narrative poetry and a Literary Titan Book Award: Poetry.

For What’s It Like To Be Old? he has won a Chrysalis BREW Seal of Excellence, a BREW Reader’s Choice Award, a Literary Titan Gold Book Award for Poetry, and also a Distinguished Favorite Award from the NYC Big Book Award. He was semi-finalist for the Washington Prize (2025), the Word Work’s Open contest (2025), and the Terry Cox Prize (2026).