David Ignatow

David Ignatow (February 7, 1914 – November 17, 1997) was an American poet and editor.

Life
David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 7, 1914, and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He died on November 17, 1997, aged 83, at his home in East Hampton, New York. His papers are held at University of California, San Diego.

Ignatow began his professional career as a businessman. After committing wholly to poetry, Ignatow worked as an editor of, among other periodicals, the American Poetry Review and the Beloit Poetry Journal, and as poetry editor of The Nation.

He taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas, Vassar College, York College (CUNY), New York University, and Columbia University. He was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1980 to 1984 and poet-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in 1987.

Awards
Ignatow's many honors include a Bollingen Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, the John Steinbeck Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award "for a lifetime of creative effort." He received the Shelley Memorial Award (1966), the Frost Medal (1992), and the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) of the Poetry Society of America.