David Abram Antin (February 1, 1932 – October 11, 2016) was an American poet, critic and performance artist. Education and early career Antin was born in New York City in 1932. After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he earned his B.A. from City College of New York in 1955 and his M.A. from New York University in 1966. He spent the first ten years of his career (1955-1964) as a translator of both scientific texts and fiction, including multiple scientific text translations (typically German to English) for Pergamon Press where he interacted frequently with the company's flamboyant founder, British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell. By the late 1950s Antin had begun to experiment with writing fiction and poetry, with his first published work appearing in the Kenyon Review in 1959. By the early 1960s, Antin had developed significantly, both as a poet and as an art critic, and it has been said that his articles about Andy Warhol and Robert Morris (in 1965) were among the first truly analytical writings about either artist. Works In the late 1960s, Antin began performing extemporaneously, improvising "talk poems" at readings and exhibitions. In the late 1960s Antin moved with his wife, the writer and performance artist Eleanor Antin, to Southern California to take up a post at the University of California, San Diego, in the newly formed and experimental Visual Arts Department. He served for a time as gallery director and from 1971 to 1999 as a Professor. During this time Antin served several terms as Chairman of the Visual Arts Dept. In the early 1970s, his influence on a nascent group of conceptual photographers among the graduate students there was powerful. He has a fellowship in the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH. He also received the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984. In 2008, Antin was a featured performer at the &NOW Festival at Chapman University. Antin said that as a child he wanted to invent things, and that to him this meant he must either become a scientist or an artist. His early published poetry, collected in Selected Poems: 1963-1973, was experimental, using found or "readymade" texts to address issues of language. In "Definitions for Mendy," a poem from this book, he uses definitions of "loss" from both a dictionary and an insurance handbook to fuel a meditation on the death of a friend. In his "Novel Poems" from