David Wojahn is the author of seven collections of poetry: Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 (2006), Spirit Cabinet (2002), The Falling Hour (1997), Late Empire (1994), Mystery Train (1990), and Glassworks (1987, winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award), all from the University of Pittsburgh Press; and Icehouse Lights (Yale University Press, 1982), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. He is also the author of Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas, 2001), a collection of essays on contemporary verse. He is the editor (with Jack Myers) of A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University, 1991). He also edited two posthumous collections of Lynda Hull’s poetry, Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2006), edited with Mark Doty as part of the Graywolf Press Poetry Re/View Series, and The Only World (HarperPerennial, 1995).

Wojahn has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois Arts Council, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as writing residencies from the Yaddo and McDowell colonies. Among his other awards and honors are the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship; the William Carlos Williams Award and the Celia B. Wagner Award, both from the Poetry Society of America; Vermont College’s Crowley/Weingarten Award for Excellence in Teaching; the George Kent Prize from Poetry magazine; and three Pushcart Prizes.

His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in many journals and anthologies, among them The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Poetry series, The American Poetry Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Georgia Review, and TriQuarterly. Wojahn teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.  

Photo by Noelle Watson