John Koethe

John Koethe was born in San Diego, California in 1945. He was educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities and is a Professor of Philosophy at UWM. His award-winning poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Brooklyn Review, Cream City Review, Epoch, The New Republic, Paris Review, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Blue Vents (1969), The Late Wisconsin Spring (1984), and The Constructor (1999). His 1973 book of poems, Domes, won the 1973 Frank O'Hara Award for Poetry, and his 1997 collection, Falling Water, received the highly coveted 1998 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. Additionally, the poem "A Pathetic Landscape" from Falling Water received the 1998 Elizabeth Machette Stover Award from Southwest Review. Prof. Koethe has received Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships and he is also author of the well-received scholarly study, The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (1996). In presenting the Tufts Award to Falling Water, the award's panel of judges cited Prof. Koethe's "precise, unpedantic pavanes and sarabandes, written with a philosopher's ear for the spare beauty of abstraction ... They move the reader both as music and as meaning." On February 20, 2000, John Koethe was honored by being named Milwaukee's first poet laureate.