Daniel Tobin appointed Interim Dean of the School of the Arts

The Emerson College Board of Trustees has approved President Liebergott’s appointment of Daniel Tobin to the position of Interim Dean of the School of the Arts. He will begin those duties on August 1, 2010.

Tobin has been a professor at Emerson since 2002 and is the author of four books of poems; Where the World is Made (University Press of New England, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005) and Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008). Among his awards are The Discovery/The Nation Award, The Robert Penn Warren Award, The Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily as well as a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Poetry Book Award. Most recently, he was named a recipient of a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for 2009.

Tobin’s poems have appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The Harvard Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, DoubleTake, The Kenyon Review, Image, The Times Literary Supplement (England), Stand (England), Agenda (England), Descant (Canada) and Poetry Ireland Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, was published to wide praise from the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. He has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Light in the Hand: The Selected Poems Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2007), and (with Pimone Triplett) Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007).  His work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary poetry in the United States and abroad as well.

Tobin holds a BA from Iona College, an MTS from Harvard University, an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and a PhD from the University of Virginia.