Compassion Through the Arts Committee

ROBIN DAVIDSON

Robin Davidson was born in Trieste, Italy to parents serving in the U.S. Judge Advocate General Corps. A fourth generation Texan who has made Houston her home for the past sixty years, Robin is a poet, literary translator, and Professor Emerita of English, for the University of Houston Downtown, specializing in creative writing and twentieth-century East European literature.

She earned a B.A. in French language and literature from the University of Texas at Austin, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Recipient of a Fulbright professorship in Poland, an NEA fellowship, and multiple Houston Arts Alliance awards, she has authored two poem chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo and City that Ripens on the Tree of the World (2013), and the collections, Luminous Other, awarded Ashland Poetry Press’s 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, and Mrs. Schmetterling (Arrowsmith Press, 2021).

From 2015 to 2017 she served as the City of Houston’s second Poet Laureate and edited the citywide anthology, Houston’s Favorite Poems, inspired by U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project. The volume includes 185 poems by 119 poets from across the globe chosen by more than 200 Houstonians as beloved poems.

With Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, she has co-translated two volumes of Ewa Lipska’s poems from the Polish—The New Century (Northwestern UP, 2009) and Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton UP’s Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, 2021).

She is currently at work on two manuscripts of new poems, as well as translating Lipska’s newest book, The Goldberg Variations, and Ravensbrück survivor, Zofia Romanowicz’s Wiersze Obozowe (Camp Poems).