Ross Tharaud was born and raised in New York City. He had a private school education, including at St. Mark’s School in Massachusetts – where he won the annual poetry prize for two years. At Cornell Unversity, Tharaud studied under the poet A.R. Ammons and the poet and novelist Robert Morgan. He won the university poetry prize and graduated summa cum laude in English literature. His first collection of poetry, Openings, was published the year after his graduation.
Tharaud continued writing poetry during his tenure as a social worker in Marquette, Michigan, and as a government clerk and paralegal in Seattle—and after that during his attendance at the Temple (Beasley) School of Law and subsequent career as an appellate lawyer for many years in Philadelphia. His second collection of poems is Fortune’s Room.
The poems in his present collection, Night Sleeps in Berlin, are notable for their variety in subject, style and tone. Roger Gilbert, a professor of modern poetry at Cornell, has written that the book “spans lyric tenderness and epic vision, urban isolation and domestic warmth.” He also writes that Tharaud brings “a beguiling verbal artistry to everything he touches.”
Tharaud has joked that if a reader doesn’t like a particular poem, (s)he should just turn the page to the next, which will be very different! Poet and novelist Robert Morgan has noted the pleasurable surprises of the poems in Night Sleeps in Berlin, that they “come to us from unexpected directions, and open to unexpected horizons.”
These characteristics make Night Sleeps in Berlin a suitable gift for anyone who enjoys poetry.
