Stanley Kunitz was selected as Provincetown’s first Poet Laureate in 2004, a position created by the Cultural Council. His first collection of poems, Intellectual Things, appeared when he was twenty-five. Selected Poems, 1928-1958 won the Pulitzer Prize. A recent volume, Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, published in 1995, his ninetieth year, won the National Book Award. He has since published The Collected Poems (2000), and will come out with a new book in June 2005. Other honors for his poetry include the Bollingen Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship, the Brandeis Medal of Achievement, a Harriet Monroe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Award, a Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. He was designated the first State Poet of New York (1987-89) and awarded the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit. Harvard gave him its Centennial Medal in 1992; and President Clinton, at a White House ceremony, awarded him the National Medal of Arts. In 1998 he received the Frost Medal for distinguished poetic achievement over a lifetime, and in 2000 was named United States Poet Laureate.

Mr. Kunitz is a founder of the Fine Arts Work Center here in Provincetown. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, and founding president emeritus of Poets House in New York, Mr. Kunitz lives in New York City in the winter and Provincetown in the summer, where he cultivates a renowned seaside garden.