Cyrus Cassells


Cyrus Cassells is an American poet and professor.

Life and work

Cassells was born in Dover, Delaware, grew up in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles, and began writing poetry in high school. He graduated in 1979 from Stanford University with a degree in film and broadcasting, and landed a job creating poetry filmstrips in the film division of a publishing house, where he was working when poet Al Young called to tell him that his manuscript had been selected for publication from the 1981 National Poetry Series competition. He then went on to win the 1981 National Poetry Series competition. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher. Since 1998, he has taught poetry at Texas State University in the MFA creative writing program. He lives in Austin.
Cassells' collection More Than Peace and Cypresses, and his fifth book, The Crossed-Out Swastika, were published by Copper Canyon Press. He has won many awards including a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His collection Soul Make A Path Through Shouting was nominated in 1994 for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Cassell's poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and in such journals as Ploughshares Indiana Review, AGNI, The Literati Quarterly, Boston Review, Icarus, and Callaloo.
He is out as gay.

Poetry collections