Jon Swan

Who is Jon Swan?

Jon Swan is an American poet, playwright, librettist, journalist, and editor. He studied at Oberlin College, from which he graduated with a degree in English in 1950. In the 1950s, he taught at the Ecole d'Humanite in Switzerland, worked for the American Friends Service Committee, and received a Master's Degree in English from Boston University. From 1956 to 1960, he was a fact checker and poetry reader at The New Yorker. In 1962, he and Marianne Hamaker were married in Haarlem, the Netherlands. During the 1970s, he worked as a translator, from Dutch and German, and was senior editor at Saturday Review and, later, senior editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. After retiring in 1994, he worked as an editor in Beijing and Kathmandu. As a free-lance journalist, he has written about environmental issues in the U.S. and Iceland. He was awarded a Rockefeller Grant for playwriting in 1968 and a Guggenheim Fellowship for filmwriting in 1981.

Swan has published three collections of poems -- Journeys and Return, A Door to the Forest, and Landscape & Language—and a collection of one-act plays.