Bio

Baron Wormser was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1948. He grew up in Baltimore and went to high school at Baltimore City College and to college at the Johns Hopkins University. He did graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Maine.

In 1970 he moved to Maine with his wife Janet. For twenty-five years he worked as a librarian for SAD 59 in Madison, Maine. Also he taught poetry writing at the University of Maine at Farmington. From 1975 to 1998 he lived with his family in Mercer, Maine, in an off-the-grid house on forty-eight acres. His memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid, (see Books) concerns that experience.

In 2000 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine by Governor Angus King. He served in that capacity for six years and visited many libraries and schools throughout Maine. Also he read his poem “Building a House in the Maine Woods, 1971” at Governor Baldacci’s inauguration in 2003. (See Talks to read the poem.)

He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife. In 2009 he joined the Fairfield University MFA program. (See Talks to read his 2011 commencement address.) He works widely in schools with both students and teachers.

Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota. Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar.