John Godfrey

John Godfrey is a New York poet born in 1945 in Massena, New York, who has lived in Manhattan's East Village since the 1960s. He has written more than a dozen poetry collections. He received an A.B. from Princeton in 1967 and a B.S. in Nursing from Columbia in 1994. He worked for 17 years as a nurse clinician in HIV/AIDS before retiring in 2011. He has received fellowships from the General Electric Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Z Foundation. His Wave Books selection, The City Keeps: Selected and New Poems 1966-2014 (2016), gathers work across five decades. Critics praise his short, jumpy lines and his portraits of downtown New York life.