Robert Hass has served as the U.S. Poet Laureate and is the author of many best-selling poetry collections, most recently The Apple Trees at Olema. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, and the National Book Award, as well as numerous other honors, including a MacArthur fellowship. He has written several books of prose books, including Twentieth-Century Pleasures, and has translated the work of Nobel-prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Hass teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in the Bay Area.