Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 8, 1951, Morrow grew up in Littleton, Colorado, and, "after a decade of vagabonding from Honduras to France, Italy to England", settled in New York City, where he remains. In 1966, he was selected by the Colorado Medical Association to serve with a small number of other teenage volunteers as a medical assistant with the Amigos de las Americas program, giving inoculations and working with health-care professionals in poor, very rural areas in Honduras. The following year, 1967—1968, Morrow was a foreign exchange student under the auspices of the American Field Service, completing his final year of high school at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. After completing his B.A. in English Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, 1969—1972, where he graduated summa cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa, he received a Danforth Fellowship to continue graduate studies in English and comparative literature at Yale University. Upon leaving Yale, Morrow moved first to Ithaca, New York, where he began research on a full-scale bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, consulting the archives at Cornell University, and then to Santa Barbara, California, where he met John Martin, of Black Sparrow Press, who would publish the bibliography in 1978.
The literary biannual journal Conjunctions was conceived in late 1980 as "Morrow sat in Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth's library in Santa Barbara, California. The two friends had the idea to assemble a Festschrift for James Laughlin, the beloved editor of New Directions." After being published by David R. Godine (1985—1987) and Collier Books/Scribner (1988—1989), the journal was picked up by Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, which remains the journal's publisher.
Morrow became Rexroth's literary executor in 1982, and has edited and introduced a number of the poet’s books, including The Selected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (1984), Classics Revisited (1986), World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (1987), More Classics Revisited (1989), and with Sam Hamill coedited The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002).
He has taught at Princeton, Brown, and Columbia Universities, as well as the Naropa Institute. Since 1990 he has been a professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College.
The Review of Contemporary FictionReview of Contemporary Fiction Vol. XX, No. 1 (2000) published a "Bradford Morrow issue" in 2000, which included essays by Sven Birkerts, Forrest Gander , Patrick McGrath, Robert Creeley, Joanna Scott, Brian Evenson, William T. Vollmann, Maureen Howard, and others.
Awards and Honors more less
- Guggenheim Fellowship (2007)
- PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing (2007)
From the judges’ citation: “We were astonished to discover that Bradford Morrow has not already won this award, after 25 years of editing almost by himself one of our most distinctive and valuable literary magazines. We saw this year as a chance to correct that oversight. The range of writers he publishes (and often discovers) is a sort of who's who of 20th/21st century serious writing, and he's found a way to keep reinventing it. The fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, and art is sometimes described as 'experimental,' but we would also say innovative, daring, indispensable, and beautiful. Our best writers manifestly trust Bradford Morrow with their most ambitious work, and we can think of no higher praise for a literary magazine, or its editor.”
- O. Henry Prize for short story “Lush” (2003)
- Academy Award for Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998)
- Member, board of trustees, PEN American Center (1998—2002) and chair of the PEN Forums Committee
