Tony Hoagland, in his essay for Harper's, "Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America," wrote the following about Alan Feldman's work: "Feldman's poems are sentimental in the best sense of the word: fully intelligent, closely attentive studies of how feeling colors and enriches experience. Inventive, vital, witty, and precise, this poet has a rare and deep allegiance to the life of the heart. Reading Feldman's steady, funny, well-wrought poems reminds me how blind we are in the world; reading these poems I feel my fingertips being guided over the Braille."His poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, and others.A debut full-length collection of poems, The Happy Genius (New York: Sun, 1978) won the 1979 Elliston Book Award for the best collection of poetry published by an independent press in the United States.A Sail to Great Island was awarded the 2004 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Immortality was awarded the Four Lakes Prize, and was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in March of 2015; it received the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry in 2016. The Golden Coin also received the Four Lakes Prize and appeared in March 2018.His work is represented in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2001; 2011, The Best American Erotic Poems 1800-Present, and To Woo and To Wed: Poets on Love and Marriage. Garrison Keillor has read his work for Literary Almanac, and Ted Kooser has featured his poetry in his syndicated column, American Life in Poetry.The National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation have awarded him fellowships in poetry. His critical writing includes one of the earliest books about the poetry of Frank O'Hara for the Twayne United States Author's Series in 1979. For twenty-two years Feldman taught the Advanced Creative Writing class at the Radcliffe Seminars, Harvard University, where he was Distinguished Instructor of Writing. He lives in Framingham, MA and offers a free drop-in poetry workshops at the town's library via Zoom. He and Nan Hass Feldman, an artist, celebrated their 50th anniversary in October, 2022.
