Lewis Hyde

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, cultural critic, and MacArthur Fellow whose work explores the public life of the imagination, artistic practice, and the cultural commons. He is the author of The Gift (Random House, 1983), a landmark work that illuminates and defends the noncommercial dimensions of artistic practice. His other books include Trickster Makes This World, Common as Air, A Primer on Forgetting, and the poetry collection This Error Is the Sign of Love.

Hyde has also published two volumes of translations of Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre's poetry and is the editor of On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau. He served as director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University and later as the Richard L. Thomas Professor in Creative Writing at Kenyon College until his retirement in 2018.

He earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of Minnesota and a master's degree in comparative literature from the University of Iowa.