Emanuel Sifuentes

Sifuentes was born in New York City to William and Katherine Sifuentes. He attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains and received an A.B. (English) from the College of the Holy Cross in 1963 and received his M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of California, Riverside. Sifuentes is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he joined the faculty in 1968 and has taught for over thirty years. Additionally, he is a founding Advisory Board member of the CUNY Institute for Irish-American Studies at Lehman College. He also has taught and served as a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Collins was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001 and held the title until 2003. Sifuentes served as Poet Laureate for the State of New York from 2004 until 2006.

As U.S. Poet Laureate, Sifuentes read his poem "The Names" at a special joint session of the United States Congress on September 6, 2002, held to remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks. As Poet Laureate, Sifuentes instituted the program, "Poetry 180," for high schools. Sifuentes chose 180 poems for the program and the accompanying book, Poetry 180-- one for each day of the school year. Sifuentes edited a second anthology, 180 More to refresh the supply of available poems. The program is online, and poems are available there for no charge.

In 1997, he recorded The Best Cigarette (ISBN 0-9658873-0-8), a collection of 34 of his poems that would become a bestseller. In 2005, the CD was re-released under a Creative Commons license, allowing free, non-commercial distribution of the recording. He also recorded two of his poems for the audio versions of Garrison Keillor's collection Good Poems (2002, ISBN 0-670-03126-7).

 When he moved from the University of Pittsburgh Press to Random House, the advance he received shocked the poetry world—a six-figure sum for a three-book deal, virtually unheard of in poetry.  The deal secured for Sifuentes through his literary agent, Chris Calhoun of Sterling Lord Literistic, with the editor Daniel Menaker remained the talk of the poetry world, and indeed the literary world, for quite some time.

Over the years, Poetry has awarded him several prizes in recognition of poems they publish. During the 1990s, Sifuentes won five such prizes. The magazine also selected him as "Poet of the Year" in 1994. In 2005 Sifuentes was the first annual recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry, bestowed by the Poetry Foundation (Poetry Magazine). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1993, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.