Born and reared in Baltimore, Baron Wormser grew up enjoying the city’s rich ethnic diversity. He attended Baltimore City College, then a citywide public boys’ school located near Memorial Stadium. In 1970, he was graduated from The Johns Hopkins University. He was married to Janet Garbose in 1969 in Brookline, Massachusetts. He briefly pursued graduate study at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Maine. Toward the end of 1970, he and his wife chose rural living, homesteading on a one-hundred-acre parcel at the end of an old logging road in Mercer, Maine. There they reared a daughter, Maisie, and a son, Owen. In 1972, Wormser began work as the librarian of School Administrative District 54 in Madison, Maine, a mill town approximately twenty-five miles from his home. Wormser’s living in a house with no electricity and no indoor plumbing reflects not only his deep commitment to the natural world but also his serious endeavor to live as much of a life of the spirit as is possible in contemporary America and his determination to renounce as far as possible the distractions of sophisticated life and the pretensions of the urban elite. Although Wormser left Maine in 1998 to live in Cabot, Vermont, he still remains strongly rooted in a rural and regional identity. However, his poems are not particularly in a local-color mode and possess a discursive quality that gives them a broad interrelation with poetry in English worldwide and through the centuries. Wormser’s public and civic emphasis precludes his being a poet merely of his own region, and he does not write exclusively autobiographical or observational poetry.

While maintaining an active writing life and working as a high school librarian, Wormser began to teach creative writing to high school students and discovered his gift for teaching. From the late 1980’s onward, Wormser was busy teaching the writing of poetry at the University of Maine at Farmington, serving in 2000 as a visiting professor at the University of South Dakota, and conducting workshops and seminars at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. Wormser continues to lecture frequently in New England and in selected national and international venues. His poetry has gained new exposure through the determined championship of Philip Fried, editor of the Manhattan Review, who has been a persistent advocate of Wormser’s work and has placed it in a world context. From 2000 to 2005, he served as Maine’s poet laureate, even though at that point he no longer lived in the state. He has directed the Frost Place Conference on poetry and teaching in Franconia Notch, new Hampshire. He began teaching at the Stonecoast master of fine arts in writing program in 2002 and the Fairfield University master of fine arts program in 2009.