This year marks James Richardson’s 41st as a member of the faculty at Princeton, where he earned his undergraduate degree in 1971. He will transfer to emeritus status at the end of this academic year.

One former student recalled entering his “Introductory Poetry” workshop as a “young writer with no shortage of self-doubt, yet Jim treated me as someone whose mind deserved to be taken seriously,” she said. “Jim has the rare skill of knowing how to read his students — really read them, on both intellectual and affective levels — and how to adroitly pitch his feedback and lessons to students of myriad intellectual and social backgrounds.”  

Colleagues lauded his pedagogy as well as his accomplishments as an award-winning poet who has published numerous collections of his work.

“As a scholar of poetics, he did a unique service to our students — both graduate and undergraduate — by training them in the ‘how’ of poetry: how meter, rhyme, form, genre, figuration and allusion make a poem go — or not go, as the case may be,” a fellow professor noted. “Jim’s students learn poetry on their pulses — by scansion exercises, by tapping out rhythms, by reading aloud to experience what Jim calls the ‘mouthiness’ of poems.”

An alumna who went on to earn an MFA in poetry recalled Richardson’s guidance as she worked on a collection of poems for her undergraduate thesis at Princeton. “During the year I worked with him, he maintained a delicate balance between proactively steering my thesis project and instilling in me the confidence to steer it myself,” she noted. “There was a magic to his mentorship, too — a balance between criticism and encouragement, rigor and license, that I can appreciate even more in retrospect than I did then.”

Another former student recalled feeling “intellectually exhilarated” after his meetings with Richardson. “Here he was talking to me as a friend — as if I, too, could be that smart, that wise, that thoughtful — and sharing, with a broad smile and ready laugh, my enthusiasm for poetry.”