About Robin Davidson

Robin Davidson is the author of two poem chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and City that Ripens on the Tree of the World (Calypso Editions, 2013), and the collections, Luminous Other, awarded Ashland Poetry Press’s 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, and Mrs. Schmetterling released by Arrowsmith Press in December, 2021.

 

In 2015 she was named Houston’s second Poet Laureate by Mayor Annise Parker, and served through 2017 under the leadership of Mayors Parker and Sylvester Turner during which time she edited the citywide anthology, Houston’s Favorite Poems (Calypso Editions, 2018). The anthology, inspired by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, includes 185 poems by 119 poets from across the globe chosen by more than 200 Houstonians as beloved poems.

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Davidson is also a literary translator, and with Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, has co-translated two volumes of Ewa Lipska’s poems from the Polish into English—The New Century: Poems by Ewa Lipska (Northwestern UP, 2009) and Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton UP’s Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, 2021).

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Recipient of two Houston Arts Alliance awards, a Fulbright professorship in Poland, and an NEA translation fellowship, Davidson was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019. She teaches literature and creative writing as Professor Emerita of English for the University of Houston Downtown and serves as a member of the Steering Committee for Writers for Democratic Action and as chair of WDA’s Texas Chapter. She is also one of three Houston artists supporting Compassionate Houston’s development of a Compassion Through The Arts program. Davidson believes in the transformative power of the arts to deepen our experience of human empathy and compassion, both personally and culturally.