Robert Masterson

Robert Masterson is a former professor of English at Concordia College in Bronxville, New York. Masterson holds both a BA and an MA (with distinction) in English Literature from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado; and a weird little academic certificate from Shaanxi Normal University, Xian, Shaanxi Province, the People’s Republic of China. Masterson spent most of his childhood and graduated from high school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where all his parents worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. He has visited the Trinity Site southwest of Socorro, New Mexico; the nuclear reactors at Brookhaven and Indian Point, New York; spent the summer of 1993 in Hiroshima, Japan, researching A-bomb survivors; and toured childrens’ hospitals and the Chernobyl site itself in Ukraine in 2000. In addition to university and public school classrooms, Masterson’s teaching has taken him to the People’s Republic of China and inside New Mexico and Colorado state penal institutions. He received the 1987 Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of New Mexico and the first Ted Berrigan Scholarship from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993 and has been a featured workshop leader during the Taos Poetry Festival / World Heavyweight Poetry Bout.