Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus
       The Johns Hopkins University

Allen Grossman was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1932; he received his B.A. and M.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University.  Professor Grossman taught at Brandeis until 1991, when he became the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University, where he taught in the English Department for sixteen years.

An award-winning poet, scholar, and teacher, Allen Grossman is the author of 15 books of poetry and prose, including The Ether Dome (poetry) and The Long Schoolroom (prose).  Among many other prizes, in 1989, he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship Prize and, in 1993, was elected Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Grossman's enduring accomplishments as a teacher are written into the minds and hearts of the hundreds upon hundreds of students, graduate and undergraduate, who have engaged with him in "thinking of a poetic kind/ about common concerns."  As he writes in How to Do Things with Tears (2001):

              If there are no common concerns
              no experience the same for you and me

              there can be no thinking of a poetic kind--maybe
              no thinking at all.

              Indeed, if it were possible to FIND by this means--
              i.e., thinking of a poetic kind
              COMMON CONCERNS

              THAT WOULD AFTER ALL BE ENOUGH.  (xii)

Professor Allen Grossman's most recent book is Descartes' Loneliness (2007). 

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