Kenneth O. Hanson

Kenneth O. Hanson (1922 – November 28, 2003 in Athens, Greece) was an American teacher, translator, and poet.

Life

Hanson, a native of Idaho, received his B.A. from the University of Idaho, in 1942. He then pursued graduate study in comparative literature and the Chinese language at the University of Washington, where he was an instructor. Hanson was a Kenan Professor of English and Humanities, at Reed College, from 1954 until 1986.^[1]

Hanson wrote numerous volumes of his poetry and published translated poems from both French and Chinese. His poetry was published in numerous magazines and journals including The New Yorker, the Nation, Botthege Oscure, Poetry Magazine,^[2] and Poetry Northwest.

He retired to permanently live in Greece, the country that he discovered in 1963 and where he had been visiting.

Some of his papers are held at Emory University.^[3]

Awards

• Theodore Roethke Award in 1964 for best poems by a Northwest poet.^[4]
• Fulbright Grant to attend the first Institute in Chinese Civilization in Formosa
• Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship
• Rockefeller Foundation Grant in humanities
• Bollingen Foundation grant to translate works by the Sung Dynasty poet Han Yü (resulting in the 1978 volume Growing Old Alive)
• two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
• The Distance Anywhere, won the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets in 1966

Works

• Lighting the Night Sky. Breitenbush Books. 1983. 
• The Distance Anywhere. University of Washington Press. 1968. ISBN 978-0-295-73710-2. 
• Saronikos and Other Poems. Press-22. 1970. 
• Growing Old Alive Copper Canyon Press 1978

Anthologies

• Norton Anthology of Poets in 1979
• Robin Skelton (1968). Five poets of the Pacific Northwest. University of Washington Press. 

References

External links