David L. Fisher, born March 16, 1942, grew up in North Carolina and graduated summa cum laude from Duke University. He was in the Norwegian Merchant Marines, and is fluent in and has translated poetry from several languages. He studied at the University of Tubingen and the Sorbonne, and has completed the work for his doctorate from Yale. He has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for The Book of Madness and won the first annual Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams award for the best book of poetry in America (1978) for his book Teachings.

He has worked as a professor in several colleges and manned suicide prevention hotlines. David Fisher has spent a life committed to civil liberty and the protection of animals. He has not given up on any cause he espoused and has received the gratitude of his friends and high officials for his courage and commitment. He lives in Carmichael, CA. and maintains a voluminous correspondence with family and friends around the world and continues a lively dialogue with poets past and present.

He is the recipient of the first William Meredith Award for Poetry. The president of the William Meredith Foundation, Richard Harteis, asserts that the publication of David Fisher’s collected poems, I Hear Always the Dogs on the Hospital Roof may be “the most important project we have completed in the past five years since William’s death and the establishment of the foundation in his name.”

In his foreword to the book, Harteis explains that: “David Fisher [is] a poet William first invited to the Library of Congress and who won the award for the best book published in 1978….David is a hero of large dimension, a poet of great tenderness, power, and imagination.”