Taije Silverman

Taije Silverman is an American poet, translator, and professor. She currently teaches at the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Taije Silverman was born in San Francisco, California (1974). Her father was a real estate developer and architect and her mother an art teacher. She has lived in different cities in the United States including Houston, Berkeley, Atlanta, New York, D.C., Ithaca, Princeton, and Charlottesville. She is a 1996 graduate of Vassar College.

Silverman is a widely recognized contemporary poet. She is the author of Houses Are Fields, a book of poetry, published by LSU Press in 2009, and selected as the debut book in their Sea Cliff Series. The book is about responding to her mother's death. US Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway called Houses Are Fields "one of the most beautiful books I've read in years." Silverman's individual poems have been published in journals including Poetry, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, The Antioch Review and AGNI. Houses Are Fields appeared in Italian translation in 2013 (Le Case Sono Campi, trans. Giorgia Pordenoni, Oedipus Edizioni). Silverman's poems are also featured in the premier anthology of contemporary American poetry, The Best American Poetry (2016, 2017). Her poetry focuses on intimacy and loss, and is characterized by a style of strong narrative and deep but fragmented lyricism.

As a translator, she is best known for her translations of Giovanni Pascoli, which have appeared in The Nation, New England Review, Agni, Pleiades and Modern Poetry in Translation, and is considered one of the most innovative contemporary English translators of Italian poetry. Silverman has also translated Pier Paolo Pasolini's dialect poetry and different works by Paolo Valesio.

She has taught at the University of Bologna in Italy under a Fulbright fellowship, Ursinus College, and Emory University, where she also served as the creative writing fellow. Silverman has also served as a teaching fellow at the University of Maryland and University of Houston. Previously, she has worked as a poetry instructor in public schools through the Writers-in-the-Schools program.

• W.K. Rose Fellowship
• Emory University Poetry Fellowship
• Fulbright Research Scholarship (2010-2011)
• MacDowell Colony Residence
• Virginia Center for Creative Arts Residence
• Academy of American Poets - Anais Nin Award
• Anne Halley Prize for Poetry (2016)