Born in Lewiston, Maine, Willis Barnstone was educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, the Sorbonne, and Yale. He taught in Greece at the end of the Civil War (1949-51), and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War. During the Cultural Revolution he went to China where he was later a Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984-85). Former O'Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University.

A Guggenheim Fellow, his awards include a National Endowment for the Arts award, a National Endowment for the Humanities award and four Pulitzer Prize nominations for poetry. His work-which includes Modern European Poetry-(Bantam, 1967), The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984) and Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (Yale, 1993)-has appeared in, Harper's, New York Review of Books, Paris Review Poetry, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement.