Jonas Zdanys received his B.A. in English from Yale University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York. A bilingual poet and translator, he is the author of  forty-five books, forty-one of them collections of poetry, written in English and in Lithuanian, and of translations from the Lithuanian. He has received a number of prizes, book awards, writing and travel grants, and public recognitions for his own poetry and for his translations, most recent among them an exhibit about his life and work by the National Library of Lithuania, appointment as Phi Beta Kappa Poet at Connecticut College, a translation grant from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, and selection for the 2012 Poet’s Voice Series.

He is also active as an editor and a literary panelist and has served as a reviewer for Wesleyan University Press, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and World Literature Today. He has taught at the State University of New York and at Yale University, where he held a number of administrative positions and was a Scholar-in-Residence in the Yale Center for Russian and East European Studies. As part of his international activities, he was appointed a consultant for the reorganization of higher education by the Lithuanian Ministry of Education and the Lithuanian Parliament. Before coming to Sacred Heart in 2009, he served for more than a decade as the state of Connecticut’s Chief Academic Officer.