Paul Mariani is the University Professor of English emeritus at Boston College and was the University Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught from 1968 to 2000. He has published over 250 essays, introductions, and reviews, as well as scholarly chapters in anthologies and scholarly encyclopedias. He is the author of 21 books, including biographies of William Carlos Williams (short-listed for the American Book Award), John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and—most recently—Wallace Stevens (Simon & Schuster 2016). To date, he has published nine volumes of poetry: All That Will Be New, Slant Press, 2022), Ordinary Time, Slant Press, 2020), Epitaphs for the Journey (Cascade Books, 2012), Deaths & Transfigurations (Paraclete Press, 2005), The Great Wheel (W. W. Norton, 1996), Salvage Operations (Norton, 1990), Prime Mover (Grove Press, 1985), Crossing Cocytus (Grove Press, 1982), and Timing Devices (Godine, 1979). Sing Me a Song, She Said will be published by Slant Press in 2027.

In addition, he is the author of the spiritual memoir, Thirty Days: on Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernism. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim, the NEA, and the NEH. He is the recipient of the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. For fifteen years, he taught at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and, for another fifteen, at the Image Conferences in Colorado, Santa Fe, and Seattle. His life of Hart Crane, The Broken Tower, a feature-length film, directed by and starring James Franco, was released in 2012. He served as Poetry Editor of America Magazine from 2000 to 2006. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Image, Presence, The American Poetry Review, The Agni Review, First Things, The New England Review, The Hudson Review, Tri-Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, The New Criterion, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Sewanee Theological Review, Gettysburg Review, Santa Clara Review, Doubletake, Boston College Magazine, and Southern Quarterly, as well as in numerous anthologies. He was awarded the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the Catholic Imagination Conference at Loyola University, Chicago.