The Alumni Spotlight is a place to hear from the School of the Arts alumni community about their journeys as artists and creators.
Robert Carnevale’s '81 poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Alaska Quarterly, The Literary Review, Sidereal Times and other magazines and anthologies. His translations (with Carol Ueland) of Russian poet Aleksandr Kushner are collected in Apollo in the Grass, published this year by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Was there a specific faculty member or peer who especially inspired you while at the School of the Arts? If so, who and how?
Above all, Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott.
How did attending the School of the Arts impact your work and career as an artist?
Mainly through the two mentors I mentioned, but some other contacts led me to work at Parnassus: Poetry in Review and on the Voices & Visions film series on American poetry.
If you could revisit any piece you created during your time at the School of the Arts, which would it be? Why?
I've kept very little of the new work I created while in the program. It was more important to me for refining what I had already done and setting my sights higher for the future. (This question is a bit off-kilter for writers, because there's not much stopping us from revisiting past work.)
What was your favorite or most memorable class while at the School of the Arts?
Joseph Brodsky's The Subject Matter of Modern Lyric Poetry (actually a GSAS course at the time, but we could take it, and I did twice) and Derek Walcott's workshop.
