Jonas Zdanys was born in New Britain, Connecticut, in 1950, a few months after his parents arrived in the United States from a United Nations camp for Lithuanian refugees. He is a graduate of Yale University and earned a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York. He is the author of thirty-three books, twenty-nine of them collections of poetry and of translations from the Lithuanian. He has received a number of prizes and book awards for his own poetry, in English and in Lithuanian, and for his translations of Lithuanian poetry into English. His work has been supported by the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Research and Exchanges Board with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council on Russian and East European Studies of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, and the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. He has taught at Yale University and the State University of New York and serves presently as Chief Academic Officer in the Connecticut Department of Higher Education. He lives in North Haven, Connecticut, with his wife and daughters.
"Jonas Zdanys: Poet of 'two worlds'," The Daily Campus, 26 September 2008