Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator.

[7] Additionally, Pinsky revealed in a 1999 interview with Bomb Magazine that he enjoys jazz for its "physical immediacy, improvisation and also the sense that a lifetime of suffering and study and thought and emotion is behind some single phrase.

Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry has a strong presence in the American culture.

[15] The Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, D.C. commissioned Pinsky to write a free adaptation of Friederich Schiller's drama Wallenstein.

The Shakespeare Theatre presented the play, starring Stephen Pickering in the title role, directed by Michael Kahn, in 2013.

[17] Pinsky is also the author of the interactive fiction game Mindwheel (1984) developed by Synapse Software and released by Broderbund.

Since 2000, Farrar, Straus and Giroux have published four books of his poetry Jersey Rain (2000), Gulf Music (2007) Selected Poems (2011) and At the Foundling Hospital (2016).

He edited Singing School (2014), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling (2019) and The Book of Poetry for Hard Times (2021).