Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of twelve poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Missouri. He recently assisted in the migration of the Seattle Pacific University low-residency MFA program to its current flourishing at Whitworth University in Spokane.
His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and many other venues—national and international—and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He has blogged for the Religion Section of The Huffington Post. His recent books include Correspondence with My Greeks (2024), Lacunae (2023), Anaphora (2019), Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems (2015), Idiot Psalms (2014), Short Trip to the Edge (spiritual memoir, 2016), Endless Life (translations and adaptations of Christian mystics, 2014), and a book-length essay, The End of Suffering (2009).
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014. His current projects include Descent to the Heart, verse adaptations of selections from the writings of Saint Isaak of Syria, a new pilgrimage book focusing on Orthodox Christian enclaves in Ireland and Scotland, Holy Outpost: The Thin Place Where East Meets West, and a new collection of poems, Ways of Not Knowing.
In the preface to Scott’s Collected Poems, the esteemed Richard Howard had this to say:
Cairns is the singular poet in this age of our country who has not seen fit to oblige his poetry to serve his belief, nor his belief to serve his poetry; it is one grown-up mind we read, one man’s voice we hear: a contingency which makes it absurd for me to speak of service in either direction, for in these poems there is but one direction—inward.
