"As recounted in the memoir-essays and poignant late poems in A Double Life, the distinguished co-founding editor of Field and poet-translator, Stuart Friebert, has led the kind of globe-trotting "double life" that makes for the stuff of legend. There are fabled meetings with the likes of Günter Grass in Berlin and Paul Celan in Paris (not to mention the stray run-in with secret police in Bucharest before the fall of Ceausescu!). But Friebert also includes a sparkling homage to his late colleague, the co-founder of Umbra (with Langston Hughes and Alice Walker), Calvin Hernton. The volume richly concludes with an expert's guide to teaching literary translation. Friebert sweeps us off to another time, a parallel universe where societies heed writers and their words, and in that, he has wrought something extraordinary. 'Do you know where this is going?' as one poem playfully asks. I urge you to read it and see!"
• Cynthia Hogue, author of Revenance and In June the Labyrinth

Born in Wisconsin, Stuart Friebert spent an undergraduate year in Germany as one of the first U.S. exchange students after WW II, after which he finished a BA at Wisconsin State College/Milwaukee and took an MA and a PhD at U. Wisconsin/Madison in German Language & Literature. He began teaching at Mt. Holyoke College, then at Harvard, and finally settled at Oberlin College, where he taught German and founded and directed Oberlin's Creative Writing Program until retiring in 1997. Along the way, he co-founded Field Magazine, the Field Translation Series, and Oberlin College Press.
Friebert has published fifteen books of poems (including volumes in German), sixteen volumes of translations, anthologies, and more recently prose (stories, memoir pieces, and critical essays). He has held an N.E.A. Fellowship in poetry and received numerous awards for poems and translations, including the Four Way Book Award for Funeral Pie and the Ohioana Book Award for Floating Heart.