Robert Pinsky is the first United States Poet Laureate to have served three consecutive terms in the post. His book Gulf Music, is his seventh volume of poetry. His The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. He is the author of the best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante, co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, and author of The Life of David, a work of prose.

The poetry editor for the online magazine Slate, for seven years Pinsky appeared regularly on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer. He writes the weekly "Poet's Choice" column for the Washington Post. He was elected in 1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his poems appear in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, and frequently in The Best American Poetryanthologies. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He is one of the few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on The Simpsons.