Robert Vas Dias, an Anglo-American born in London, is the author of eight poetry collections in the USA and UK, and has edited or co-edited four literary journals - two in the USA and two in the UK.His first major collection, Speech Acts & Happenings, was published in the USA by Bobbs-Merrill in 1971, and his influential anthology, Inside Outer 'Space: New Poems of the Space Age', was published by Doubleday Anchor Books in New York. He was founding director of the Aspen Writers' Workshop in Colorado, was Poet-in-Residence at Michigan's Thomas Jefferson College, where he also founded and directed the National Poetry Festivals, and coordinated two poetry reading series in New York City. His poetry and criticism have appeared in about 100 magazines and journals, including American Book Review, Chelsea, Choice, The Nation, The New Yorker,Partisan Review, and Poetry (Chicago) in the USA, and in the UK in Ambit, Encounter, Leviathan Quarterly, The London Magazine, Long Poem Magazine, Oasis, Poetry Review, Shearsman, Stand, TLS, The Warwick Review, and others, as well as in a dozen anthologies, most recently in 'A Room to Live In: A Kettle's Yard Anthology' (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007).His most recent collection was 'Leaping Down to Earth', 2008, with images by Stephen Chambers and Tom Hammick.He taught for a number of years at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York; at New York University; in both the undergraduate and graduate Writing Programs of Antioch University in London; and in the European Division of the University of Maryland. Currently he is a tutor with The Poetry School in London, where he conducts seminars and teaches courses in American poetry, contemporary poetics, and fusions of art and poetry. He has been a consultant and contributor of entries for several editions of the American reference book Contemporary Poets. He writes on book art and artists' books for art publications in the UK.In the UK, he was General Secretary of The Poetry Society, 1975-78, and co-organised two conferences for Gresham College in London, "Sensing the Poem" in 1999, and "Verbal inter Visual" in 2001; he also co-curated the exhibition "Verbal inter Visual" for Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. He is the editor-publisher of Permanent Press.
