Robert McNamara is the author of three books of poetry, Second Messengers (Wesleyan), The Body & the Day (David Robert Books), and Incomplete Strangers (Lost Horse Press). For the last forty years, his poems have been widely in journals and anthologies, most recently in the anthologies The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy and The Book of Irish-American Poetry. He has co-translated The Cat Under the Stairs (EWU Press), a selection of the poems of Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, a distinguished contemporary Bengali poet.
In the early 70s, after receiving a BA from Amherst College, Bob studied poetry with Bill Tremblay at Colorado State University. In 1976 he founded L'Epervier Press, which in its fourteen years of activity published forty-five titles by more than thirty poets. In those same years he taught for the Experimental College at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Rocky Mountain Writers Guild.
In 1986, Bob settled in academe, and for thirty years taught at the University of Washington in its unique Interdisciplinary Writing Program. In addition, he taught for a number of years in Certificate Program in Creative Writing offered by UW Extension and served as University Director of the Puget Sound Writing Project. He spent two quarters teaching in the department’s program in Rome and another two in an AHI program in Siena. He received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the English Department in 2008.
Bob has received a number of awards and fellowships for his writing and translating, among them a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and a Fulbright Fellowship for language study and translation in Calcutta, India.
He retired from teaching in 2016.
