Paul Violi wrote eleven books of poetry in his lifetime, including Overnight, Fracas, The Curious Builder, and Likewise, from Hanging Loose Press. A selection of his longer poems, Breakers, was also published by Coffee House Press. Widely published and anthologized both in the U.S. and abroad, he received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry, as well as grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001 he received The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Violi taught at various colleges and universities, both public and private-New York University, The Dalton School, Sing-Sing, Stevens Institute of Technology, Bloomfield College, State University of New York at Purchase, Scarsdale Teachers Institute. At the time of his death in April of 2011 he was teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and in the graduate writing program at New School University.