Jonas Zdanys, a Branford College alumnus, graduated from Yale in 1972.
A bilingual poet and translator, he is the author of fifty-six books; fifty of them are collections of his own poetry, written in English and in Lithuanian, and his translations into English of Lithuanian poetry and fiction. He has also edited several international anthologies, all published by Lamar University Press. They include volumes of epistolary poetry; found poetry; contemporary surrealist and magical realist poetry and, most recently, contemporary dream poetry. His forthcoming books are Iseivystes Fragmentai (immigration Fragments, a volume of poetry in Lithuanian, for which he has received a grant from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture; and My Uncle’s Watch, a handmade letterpress limited edition created to commemorate the 75th anniversary of his family’s arrival as refugees in the United States.
He worked at Yale for eighteen years, from 1980 to 1998, teaching translation seminars in the Literature Major and poetry writing seminars in the English Department, while 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 in Lithuaniaa 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. He served from 2009 until 2021 as Professor of English at Sacred Heart University where he created and directed the program in creative writing, and taught creative writing seminars and seminars on modern American poetry. He serves currently as Poet in Residence and Professor Emeritus of English at Sacred Heart University.
He has received a number of prizes and book awards for his own poetry and for his translations of Lithuanian poetry, including Lithuania’s Jotvingiai Prize, a major Lithuanian prize for poetry awarded by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. He was awarded the prize for his collection of poetry, written in Lithuanian, Dūmų Stulpai (Pillars of Smoke), published by the Lithuanian Writers Union Publishing House in 2002. Zdanys was recognized, too, for two additional books published that year: Five Lithuanian Women Poets, his translation into English of poems by Lithuania’s leading women poets, and Inclusions in Time, his translation into English of poems by Lithuanian poet Antanas A. Jonynas.
He was nominated in 2023 for the Lithuanian National Prize in culture and the Arts , and was honored with an exhibition about his life and literary work by the National Library of Lithuania on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday: He has also been awarded the Lithuanian Writers Union Prize for Translation in 1996 for his book Four Poets of Lithuania; the Lithuanian Writers’ Society Prize for Best Book of the Year in 1994 for Aušros Daina (Aurora’s Song), a volume of his poetry in Lithuanian; and the Phillips Poetry Award and the Weinstein Memorial Creative Writing Award for his English-language poems. He also was selected as Finalist for the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry for Water Light, a volume of his selected poems. Zdanys has also received various grants in support of his literary work, among them awards from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the International Research and Exchanges Board with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council on Russian and East European Studies of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Lietuviškos Knygos/Books From Lithuania, and the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture.
Both of his children also are Branford College alumnae: Kristina (‘04, Yale Medical School ‘08), a geriatric psychiatrist, is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, and Joanna (‘07, Columbia University M.A. ‘09, and Fordham Law School ‘13) is Deputy Director in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. His wife, Jean, holds an M.S.N. from the Yale School of Nursing and recently retired as a pediatric nurse practitioner in the New Haven Health Department. He has four grandchildren: Laura, Julia, Theodore and Sebastian.