Aaron Shurin

Aaron Shurin is an American poet, essayist, and university instructor.

Aaron Shurin received his M.A. in Poetics from New College of California. He is a recipient of California Arts Council Literary Fellowships in poetry (1989, 2002), and a NEA fellowship in creative nonfiction (1995). He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including: Into Distances (1993), The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems (1999), A Door (2000), Involuntary Lyrics (2005), and a volume of prose: Unbound: A Book of AIDS (1997).

He has taught extensively in the fields of American poetry and poetics, contemporary and classical prosody, improvisational techniques in composition, and the personal essay. According to his biography at the University of San Francisco where he teaches, his own work is framed by the innovative traditions in lyric poetry as they extend the central purpose of the Romantic Imagination: to attend the world in its particularities, body and soul.

Poetry remains for me an act of investigation, by which the imagination makes itself visible in a real world - and through which the inhabitants of that realer world become dimensional."