Davison, Peter

Davison, Peter, 1928-2004. poet; AAAS, 2001; editor, Atlantic Monthly x Peter Hubert Davison

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/about/people/phdbio.htm

Peter Davison

Poetry Editor

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Peter Davison, in addition to being poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly, where he has served in various editorial capacities for fifty years, has had a long and distinguished career both as a poet and as a book publisher. Born in New York City in 1928, Davison is the son of the English poet Edward Davison, who had emigrated to the United States a few years earlier, and who had a long career as a teacher, initially at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Davison was raised. Educated at Harvard and at Cambridge University in England, Davison became an editor at Harcourt, Brace at the age of twenty-two, moving to Boston in 1955 to work at Harvard University Press and then the Atlantic Monthly Press, where he remained for the next twenty-nine years, latterly as its editor-in-chief and director. He edited books for his own imprint at Houghtin Mifflin from 1985 to 1998. His career as a poet began in 1963 when his first book, The Breaking of the Day, was chosen as the Yale Series of Younger Poets volume for that year. Since then he has published ten other books of poems, most recentlyBreathing Room (2000). He is the author of an autobiographical volume, Half Remembered: A Personal History, a work of biographical criticism, The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955-1960, and a book of essays,One of the Dangerous Trades: Essays on the Work and Workings of Poetry.