John Koethe was born in San Diego in 1945 and received an A.B. from Princeton and a Ph.D. from Harvard in Philosophy. He has taught since 1973 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from which he will retire at the end of 2009 as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. He has published eight books of poetry, most recently North Point North: New and Selected Poems (2002), Sally’s Hair (2006), and Ninety-Fifty Street (2009), all from HarperCollins; two books of philosophy, The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (1996) and Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (2005), both from Cornell University Press; and a book of literary essays, Poetry at One Remove. He has received the Frank O’Hara Award for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. He was the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, and has been a Fellow at the American Academy of Berlin and the Elliston Poet in Residence at the University of Cincinnati. He will spend the spring semester of 2010 as the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton.

Recorded Friday, October 09, 2009 at University of Chicago - Social Sciences Tea Room.