Todd Boss

Todd (Ryan) Boss (born 6 December 1968) is an American poet, installation artist, and film producer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published several notable collections of poetry, besides many contributions to literary journals, and has also produced a large body of poetry intended for musical setting, most frequently in collaboration with the composer Jake Runestad.

Biography

Boss was born in Marshfield, Wisconsin,^[1] where he grew up on a cattle farm. His post-secondary education began at St. Olaf College, which he attended between the years 1987 and 1991 to earn a B.A. degree in English and Speech-Theater. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage between 1992 and 1994 to earn a M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing. In Minneapolis, he teaches at the Loft Literary Center and has been an artist-in-residence at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota. He is the father of two children.

Activities and awards

The most significant collections of poetry authored by Todd Boss are his Yellowrocket of 2008, Pitch of 2012 and the forthcoming Tough Luck. His poems have also appeared in Poetry, the American Poetry Review, The London Times, The New Yorker, NPR, Best American Poetry, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded Todd its Emily Clark Belch Prize in 2009 for his collection Yellowrocket. Pitch won the Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award in 2012. ^[2]

As an installation artist, Boss is noted for his 2012 memorial to the collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis that crosses the Mississippi River that was prepared in collaboration with the Swedish artist Maja Spasova. The installation was paired with a cycle of 35 poems: “Fragments for the 35W Bridge”.^[3] He also arranged for a monumental poetry film projection onto the façade of the historic Union Depot in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2014. ^[4]

As an author of poetry for musical setting, Boss has collaborated with Jake Runestad on three major choral works: And So I Go On, Waves, and One Flock. He also wrote the poetry for the song cycle Panic by Andy Vores, which was first performed at the Boston Conservatory in 2014.

Boss is the founding Executive and Artistic Director of Motionpoems, the world’s only poetry film company. ^[5]

Poetry Collections

• Yellowrocket (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), ISBN 9780393067682
• Pitch (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), ISBN 9780393345520
• Tough Luck (New York: W.W. Norton, forthcoming)

References

External links

• Todd Boss website
• Todd Boss biography from the website of the Poetry Foundation
• Todd Boss biography from the website of the Academy of American Poets
• Motionpoems website
• IMDb website