About
Hello, I'm Don.
I’m an American poet, memoirist and translator. Born in Nevada and raised (sort of) in California. After graduating from Cal State, Sacramento (M.F.A., 1978), where I had the good fortune of working with the poet Dennis Schmitz, and from the University of Montana (M.A., 1980), where I had the further good fortune of taking workshops with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees, I ran away to Greece and have lived here ever since.
Fluent in Greek, a citizen of both my homeland and my adopted country, I have published six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is A Different Heaven: New & Selected Poems. I have also translated books by the esteemed Greek poets Nikos Fokas and Liana Sakelliou, and have edited an anthology that grew out of my experience as an expatriate, Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece.
Praise from Others
Poignant and profound. From the Cyclops Cave looks backward and inward—and isn’t this something we should all do? Read this book as a model for your own contemplation of the forces that shaped your life. Who loved you? Where do you feel at home? What are you still seeking? As the author wrestles with these questions, wonderfully so on an iconic Greek island, readers are allowed entry into multiple worlds: sunny California, sunny Greece, dark memories, shining moments of connection. In the end, you also might find yourself asking, “And my own life unfolding against the backdrop of a pitch black universe, what is its pattern?”
--Sharman Apt Russell on
From the Cyclops Cave:
A Braided Memoir
Here’s a poetry that I admire: vernacular, intelligent, gritty, informed, deeply engaged in the life of the world, but still keeping a sly distance. Many poems from Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean cultures, knowledgeable, and at home. Poems of politics and power, of love, of community and family. Skepticism and hard-won wholeness.
-- Gary Snyder on
Approximately Paradise
Wherever the poem comes from—from the poet’s earthly place, I mean: say Nevada, Montana, Italy, Greece, Egypt, anywhere—in the case of Don Schofield’s work, the poem comes from somewhere the reader will recognize as implicitly true, minutely accurate, and abundantly beautiful. This is work by a man as in love with language as he is with the world and with this earth.
-- Robert Wrigley on A Different Heaven: New & Selected Poems
