American male poets

James Maitland Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American actor and military officer. Known for his distinctive drawl and everyman screen persona, Stewart's film career spanned 80 films from 1935 to 1991. With the strong morality, which he portrayed both on and off the screen, he epitomized the "American ideal" in the mid-twentieth century. In 1999, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked him third on its list of the greatest American male actors. He received numerous honors including the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1980, the Kennedy Center Honor in 1983, as well as the Academy Honorary Award and Presidential Medal of Freedom, both in 1985.
Born and raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Stewart started acting while at Princeton University. After graduating, he began a career as a stage actor making his Broadway debut in the play Carry Nation (1932). He landed his first supporting role in The Murder Man (1935) and had his breakthrough in Frank Capra's ensemble comedy You Can't Take It with You (1938). Stewart went on to receive the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in George Cukor romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940). His other Oscar-nominated roles were in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Harvey (1950) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
Stewart played darker, more morally ambiguous characters in movies directed by Anthony Mann, including Winchester '73 (1950), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), and The Naked Spur (1953), and by Alfred Hitchcock in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958). Stewart also starred in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as well as the Western films How the West Was Won (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).
He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, deputy commanding the 2nd Bombardment Wing and commanding the 703d Bombardment Squadron from 1941 to 1947. He later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, and held various command positions until his retirement in 1968 as a brigadier general. Stewart remained unmarried until his 40s and was dubbed "The Great American Bachelor" by the press. In 1949, he married former model Gloria Hatrick McLean. They had twin daughters, and he adopted her two sons from her previous marriage. The marriage lasted until McLean's death in 1994, and Stewart died of a pulmonary embolism three years later.

Shane McCrae (born September 22, 1975, Portland, Oregon) is an American poet, and is currently Poetry Editor of Image.McCrae was the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Award, and in 2012 his collection Mule was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. In 2013, McCrae received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He received a Lannan Literary Award in 2017, in 2018 his collection In the Language of My Captor won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and in 2019 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Fence, and AGNI.

Farid Matuk is an American poet and educator, born to a Peruvian father and Syrian mother in Peru. He writes in both English and Spanish, and his Spanish translations have appeared in Kadar Koli, Translation Review, Mandorla, and Bombay Gin. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Flag + Void, Iowa Review, and Poetry and abroad in White Wall Review (Canada), Critical Quarterly (UK), and Poem: International English Language Quarterly (UK). He is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. His book This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine, 2010) was the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Arab American Book Awards. and was included in The Poetry Society of America's New American Poets series. My Daughter La Chola (Ahsata, 2013) received an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Arab American Book Awards. My Daughter La Chola was also named among the best books of 2013 by The Volta and by The Poetry Foundation while selections from its pages have been anthologized in The Best American Experimental Poetry, 2014, The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing Vol. 3, and in Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latino@ Writing. He serves as poetry editor for Fence and on the editorial board for the Creative Writing Studies book series at Bloomsbury. Matuk is the recipient of both the Ford Fellowship and Fulbright Fellowship. The University of Arizona Press published his second full-length collection, The Real Horse, in 2018.

José Antonio Mazzotti is a Peruvian poet, scholar, and literary activist. He is Professor of Latin American Literature and King Felipe VI of Spain Professor of Spanish Culture and Civilization in the Department of Romance Studies at Tufts University, President of the International Association of Peruvianists since 1996, and Director of the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana since 2010. He is considered an expert in Latin American colonial literature, especially in El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and the formation of criollo cultures, a critic of Latin American contemporary poetry, and a prominent member of the Peruvian 1980s literary generation. He received the José Lezama Lima special poetry prize from Casa de las Américas, Cuba, in 2018, for his collection El zorro y la luna. Poemas reunidos, 1981-2016.
During his early years, Mazzotti won the First Prize in the 1980 "Túpac Amaru" Poetry Contest at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, with Poemas no recogidos en libro (Poems Not Collected in a Book, Lima, 1981). In 1985, he published his second collection, Fierro curvo (órbita poética) (Curved Iron (poetic orbit)), and in 1988 his third book, Castillo de popa (Poop Deck), which reflects the state of mind of a wide sector of Peruvian youth at that time in the face of the difficult years of the civil war and the galloping economic deterioration of the country. The book was a finalist in the Casa de las Américas Award in Havana that same year. He has also published the poetry collections El libro de las auroras boreales (The Book of the Northern Lights, Amherst, MA, 1995), Señora de la noche (Lady of the Night, Mexico City, 1998), El Zorro y la Luna. Antología Poética 1981-1999 (The Fox and the Moon. Poetry Anthology 1981-1999, Lima, 1999), Sakra Boccata (Mexico City, 2006, and Lima, 2007, with a foreword by Raúl Zurita), Las flores del Mall (The Flowers of the Mall, Lima, 2009), Declinaciones latinas (Latin Declensions, Houston and Mexico City, 2015 ), Apu Kalypso / Palabras de la bruma (Lima, 2015), a compilation of his complete work with the same title of El Zorro y la Luna (New York, 2016), and Nawa Isko Iki / Cantos amazónicos (Lima, 2020). A bilingual version of Sakra Boccata with translations by Clayton Eshleman appeared in 2013 in Ugly Duckling Press, New York. The Fox and the Moon, a selection of his poetry in English, was published in 2018 by Axiara Editions (Oregon). He has been included in numerous Peruvian and foreign anthologies, such as the Antología general de la poesía peruana: de Vallejo a nuestros días (Lima), La mitad del cuerpo sonríe (Mexico), La letra en que nació la pena (Lima), Caudal de piedra (Mexico), Fuego abierto (Chile), Cuerpo plural (Spain), Liberation: New Works on Freedom from International Renowned Poets (USA),Volteando el siglo: 25 poetas peruanos (Cuba, 2020), etc.

Dan Chiasson (; born May 9, 1971 in Burlington, Vermont) is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country’s most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.
Chiasson is the author of six books: The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) and The Math Campers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020).
Chiasson is currently working on a nonfiction book about politics and change in American life, "Bernie for Burlington: Sanders in a Changing Vermont, 1968-1991," based in part on his own early memories of Mayor Sanders, to be published by Pantheon in 2025.

Edwin Rolfe (September 7, 1909 – May 24, 1954) was an American poet and journalist. His first collected poetry appeared in an anthology of four poets called We Gather Strength (1933). Three more collections followed, none of which were conventionally published. To My Contemporaries (1936) was published by the small Dynamo Press and included works by Archibald MacLeish. First Love and Other Poems (1951) was sold to subscribers. Permit Me Refuge (1955) was posthumous and published by the California Quarterly, whose editor Philip Stevenson took up a collection from Rolfe's friends, such as Albert Maltz, to pay for it. Thomas McGrath wrote its foreword. Rolfe's poetry was inseparable from historical events: it responded to the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the era of McCarthyism. As a poet and journalist, he contributed extensively to The Daily Worker between 1927 and 1939.

Sheldon Vanauken (; August 4, 1914 – October 18, 1996) was an American author, best known for his autobiographical book A Severe Mercy (1977), which recounts his and his wife's friendship with C. S. Lewis, their conversion to Christianity, and dealing with tragedy. He published a sequel in 1985 titled Under the Mercy.

Richard William McBride (May 8, 1928 – August 28, 2012) was an American beat poet, playwright and novelist. He worked at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers from 1954 to 1969.

James L. White (March 26, 1936 – July 13, 1981) was an American poet, editor and teacher.

Judson Crews (June 30, 1917 – May 17, 2010) was an American poet, bookseller and small press publisher.