Robert Hass?poet, critic, and teacher?is one of the most renowned figures of modern American literature, serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995-1997. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Award and shared the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection, Time and Materials: Poems 1997?2005. Hass is also the author of Field Guide (1972), Praise (1979), Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2018), among other works. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Saint Mary's College of California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics until his retirement in 2019.