J. D. McClatchy

J. D. "Sandy" McClatchy (born 1945) is an American poet and literary critic. He is editor of the Yale Review and president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

McClatchy was born Joseph Donald McClatchy, Jr., in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1945. He was educated at Georgetown and Yale, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1974. He lives in Stonington, Connecticut, and New York. His husband is graphic designer Chip Kidd.

McClatchy's poetic work is wide-ranging. He has authored six collections of poetry, the fifth of which, Hazmat, was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. He has written texts for musical settings, including ten opera libretti, for such composers as Michael Dellaira, Elliot Goldenthal, Daron Hagen, Lowell Liebermann, Lorin Maazel, Tobias Picker, Ned Rorem, Bruce Saylor, William Schuman and Francis Thorne. His honors include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1991). He has also been one of the New York Public Literary Lions, and received the 2000 Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award.

McClatchy is affiliated with Yale University, where he is an adjunct professor, fellow of Jonathan Edwards College, and editor of The Yale Review.

In 1999, he was elected into the membership of The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in January 2009 he was elected its president. He previously served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1996 until 2003. In addition to these appointments, he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. When he was given an Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1991, the citation read:

"J. D. McClatchy is a poet who has emerged into highly distinctive achievement in his third collection, The Rest of the Way. Formally a master, with enormous technical skills, McClatchy writes with an authentic blend of cognitive force and a savage emotional intensity, brilliantly restrained by his care for firm rhetorical control. His increasingly complex sense of our historical overdeterminations is complemented by his concern for adjusting the balance between his own poems and tradition. It may be that no more eloquent poet will emerge in his American generation."

With UCLA professor and poet Stephen Yenser, McClatchy serves as co-executor for the literary estate of James Merrill.