Poet Ron Padgett’s books include Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard; Oklahoma Tough; You Never Know; Poems I Guess I Wrote, and many others. Born in Oklahoma in 1942, he is also well known as a translator of French poetry whose translations include Blaise Cendrar’s Complete Poems, Pierre Cabanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, and Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Poet Assassinated. His poetry and translations have received grants and awards from the Fullbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. In 2001 he was appointed Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. He has been a teacher of imaginative writing at Columbia University and Brooklyn College, and for many years was publications director of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative. He lives in New York.