David Wojahn

Profile

David Wojahn’s eighth collection of poetry, World Tree, was selected as the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize for the most outstanding collection of verse published in 2011. His first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and published in 1982.

The collection was also the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. His second collection, Glassworks, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, and was awarded the Society of Midland Authors’ Award for best volume of poetry to be published during that year. Pittsburgh is also the publisher of four of his subsequent books, Mystery Train (1990), Late Empire (1994), The Falling Hour (1997), and Spirit Cabinet (2002).

Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004, was published by Pittsburgh in 2006, and was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. His most recent collection of poetry, For the Scribe (2017, also from Pittsburgh), was the winner of the 2017 Library of Virginia Literary Award in Poetry and finalist for the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. He is also the author of two essay collections on contemporary poetry, Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), and From the Valley of Making (University of Michigan Press, 2015),  and is editor of two posthumous collections of Lynda Hull’s poetry, The Only World (HarperCollins, 1995) and Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2006).

He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois and Indiana Councils for the Arts, and in 1987–88 was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar. He is also the winner of the 2008 Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the 2008 University Award for Distinguished Scholarship from Virginia Commonwealth University, a 2009 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia and recipient of the 2012 Library of Virginia Literary Award in Poetry (for World Tree). He has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University of Houston, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Orleans. He is presently Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as a long-serving member of VCFA’s MFA in Writing Program core faculty.