PACKARD, William 1933-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born September 2, 1933, in New York, NY; died of heart disease November 3, 2002, in New York, NY. Editor, educator, and author. Packard was a poet and fiction writer best remembered as the founding editor of the poetry magazine New York Quarterly. He was a graduate of Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1956 and attended graduate courses in 1960 and 1961. Packard then embarked on a writing career, mostly consisting of plays and poetry, interspersed with several teaching jobs, including at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theatre Arts in New York City in 1965, at the Clark Center for the Performing Arts at New York University, at the New School for Social Research, and at Cooper Union. He founded New York Quarterly in 1969, which he edited until 1996, when he suffered a stroke that caused the journal to suspend publication. He recovered enough to return to the magazine in 2002, editing the fall issue just before his death. Packard's poetry collections include such works as To Peel an Apple (1963), What Hands Are These? (1977), and The American Experience (1979), and he wrote several plays, including In the First Place (1958), On the Other Hand (1963), and From Now On (1964). He was also the author of several books on writing, among them The Poet's Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), The Art of Poetry Writing (1992), and The Art of the Playwright: Creating the Magic of Theatre (1997).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

periodicals

New York Times, November 16, 2002, p. A16.

Washington Post, November 20, 2002, p. B6.