Photo by Douglas Baz 

Peter Glassgold was born and raised in New York City and now lives in upstate New York. He is a graduate of Columbia College, and as an undergraduate he was an editor and writer for the college humor magazine, The Jester. He has been an editor at The New Leader magazine and of The New-York Historical Society Quarterly. From 1970 to 2005, he was an editor at the literary publishing house New Directions, serving as editor in chief and later as editor at large. He was a member of the Executive Board of PEN American Center from 1982 to 1996 and for ten years chaired that organization's Translation Committee. He also sat on the Professional Advisory Board of the Center for Research in Translation at SUNY–Binghamton and on the National Board of The Translation Center, Columbia University. His papers are archived at the Houghton Library, Harvard.