Born in Detroit, poet and translator Andrew J. Shields was educated at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a PhD in comparative literature. Shields’s musical and sensory poems cross great distances, often with the aid of magical realism. Read More He is the author of the poetry chapbook Cabinet d’Amateur (2005, with German translations by Ulrike Draesner and photographs by Claudio Moser) and the full-length collection Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong (2015). Shields received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for his translations of the poetry of Jacques Réda. Shields’s numerous translations from the German include Michael Krüger’s novel The Cello Player (2004), Dieter M. Gräf’s poetry collections Tousled Beauty (2005) and Tussi Research (2007), and Ilma Rakusa’s poetry collection A Farewell to Everything (2005, co-translated with Andrew Winnard). Shields contributed translations to Ice Memory: Selected Poems (2006), by Joachim Sartorius, and has also translated Letters 1925–1975 (2004), the correspondence of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Since 1995, Shields has lived in Basel, Switzerland, and taught at the University of Basel. He also performs in the musical group Human Shields.