Ned Balbo is the author of six books, including The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize) and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), both published in 2019. His previous books are Upcycling Paumanok, Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and ForeWord Indies Book of the Year Gold Medal), Galileo’s Banquet (Towson University Prize co-winner), and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Donald Justice Prize and the Poets’ Prize).
Ned’s awards include a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his translation of Paul Valéry’s “La Jeune Parque [The Young Fate],” four Maryland Arts Council poetry grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. A co-winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, he has been a fellow or scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where he was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow in 2021.
In 2022, “The Wolves of Chernobyl” shared second prize in the UK’s Keats-Shelley Memorial Association poetry competition. Ned’s poem “A Spell for Lamentation and Renewal” received the 2019 New York Encounter poetry prize and was subsequently reprinted in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity U. Press, 2025) and Ecotone’s 20th anniversary issue (2026).
Ned’s poetry, prose, flash fictions, and translations appear in Able Muse, Antioch Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, The Common, Ginkgo Prize Ecopoetry Anthology 2019, Hopkins Review, Iowa Review, Literary Matters, New Criterion, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, River Styx, Shenandoah, Sou’Wester, and many more.
Anthology appearances include poems in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets volumes Villanelles and Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman (Knopf), Outer Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge U. Press), Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana), Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women (Kasva Press), and Contemporary Catholic Poetry: an Anthology (Paraclete Press).
A graduate of Vassar, The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Ned has been a visiting associate professor in Iowa State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment and a faculty member at the Frost Farm and West Chester University poetry conferences. He is also a songwriter. A native of Suffolk County, New York, he is married to poet and essayist Jane Satterfield and lives in Baltimore.
Manor Mill reading series photo: Mel Edden
Author photo: Jane Satterfield
Ned Balbo 