Jonas Zdanys

Jonas Zdanys, a Branford College alumnus, graduated from Yale in 1972. A bilingual poet and translator, he is the author of forty-one books, thirty-eight 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: http://senas.lnb.lt/parodos/2/

He worked at Yale for eighteen years, teaching translation seminars in the Literature Major and serving in a number of administrative positions, among them Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and, for eight years, Assistant to the President. He also served as 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. He was appointed the State of Connecticut’s Chief Academic Officer and Associate Commissioner of Higher Education in 1998, a position in which he served for eleven years. Since 2009, he is Professor of English at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he teaches creative writing seminars and seminars on modern American poetry.

This is his website: http://jonaszdanys.org

Both of his children also are Branford College alumnae: Kristina (‘04, Yale Medical School ‘08) is a geratric psychiatrist, and Joanna (‘07, Columbia University M.A. ‘09, and Fordham Law School ‘13) is an attorney in New York City. His wife, Jean, holds an M.S.N. from the Yale School of Nursing and works in New Haven as a pediatric nurse practitioner.