Robert Vas Dias, an Anglo-American born in London, is the author of eight poetry collections in the USA and UK, has edited or co-edited four literary journals – two in the USA and two in the UK – and is the editor-publisher of Permanent Press, which he founded in Michigan in 1972. His first major collection, Speech Acts & Happenings, was published in the USA by Bobbs-Merrill in 1971, and his influential anthology, Inside Outer Space: New Poems of the Space Age, was published in 1970 by Doubleday Anchor Books in New York. He was founding director of the Aspen Writers' Workshop in Colorado, was Poet-in-Residence at Michigan's Thomas Jefferson College, where he also founded and directed the National Poetry Festivals, and he coordinated two poetry reading series in New York City. His poetry and criticism have appeared in about 100 magazines and journals, including American Book Review, Chelsea, Choice, The Nation, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Poetry (Chicago) in the USA, and in the UK in Ambit, Encounter, Envoi, Leviathan Quarterly, Long Poem Magazine, Oasis, Poetry Review, Shearsman, Stand, Staple Magazine, TLS, The Warwick Review and other publications, as well as in over a dozen anthologies, most recently in September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. His collaboration with the British artist John Wright, The Guts of Shadows, was published in 2003, and Leaping Down to Earth, with images by Stephen Chambers and Tom Hammick, appeared in 2008. His most recent publication is a pocket-portfolio edition of The Lascaux Variations: Fractals of Being, 2009, with images by John Wright. He has been awarded a Creative Artists Program Service (CAPS) Fellowship in Poetry (New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts), and the C. Day Lewis Fellowship in Poetry administered by the Greater London Arts Association. He taught for a number of years at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York, at New York University, in both the undergraduate and graduate Writing Programs of Antioch University in London, and in the European Division of the University of Maryland. Also in the UK, he was General Secretary of The Poetry Society, 1975-78, and co-organised two conferences for Gresham College in London, "Sensing the Poem" in 1999, and "Verbal inter Visual" in 2001; he also co-curated the exhibition “Verbal inter Visual” for Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Currently he is a Core Tutor for The Poetry School in London, where he conducts seminars and teaches courses in poetry and visual art, American poetry, and experimental poetry. He has been a consultant and contributor of entries for several editions of the American reference book Contemporary Poets.