Robert Pinsky was born in 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. His poetry books include The Figured Wheel, awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize, The Inferno of Dante, which won the Howard Morton Landon Prize in translation and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Gulf Music. His prose works include The Life of David, an account of the Biblical hero. A three-time Poet Laureate of the United States, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project; the project's most recent anthology is An Invitation to Poetry which includes a DVD featuring Americans reading and talking about beloved poems. His works about poetry include The Sounds of Poetry and Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, based on his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, at Princeton University. Pinsky is the poetry editor of the online magazine Slate and teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University. His work has appeared in Carcanet's two Five AmericanPoets anthologies, in 1979 and in 2010. He has appeared as himself in the animated sitcom The Simpsons.