David Dalton Yezzi (born 1966) is an American poet, editor, actor,[1] and professor. He currently teaches poetry in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Yezzi was Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City from 2001 to 2005 and has worked as executive editor and, then, poetry editor of The New Criterion, associate editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and was on the staff of The New York Observer.[6] He is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and a former editor of The Hopkins Review.
Yezzi was a co-founder of the San Francisco theater company, Thick Description, and has performed in works by Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht, Goethe, Williams, and others in the United States and Europe.[6] In March 2010, Verse Theater Manhattan presented Yezzi's evening of verse monologues, Dirty Dan & Other Travesties, at the Bowery Poetry Club, with Yezzi performing "Tomorrow & Tomorrow." In October 2021, he performed the title role in The Baltimore Shakespeare Factory's production of King Lear.[7] He is a 2024-2026 member of the acting company at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company.
In 1998, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University (1998–2000).[6]
In December 2008, Azores was chosen as a Slate magazine "Best Book of 2008." In 2015, Birds of the Air was a finalist for the Poets' Prize. Late Romance was an editors' selection at The New York Times Book Review in 2023. In 2022, he was a short-term visiting fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He is a 2024 James Merrill House Fellow and a 2025-6 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.
