Lake

An award-winning poet, Todd Davis (website) is professor of environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College. He brings to bear a lived knowledge of the natural world and writes accessible poems based upon a life in rural regions in the Rust Belt, specifically along the Allegheny Front for the past two decades.

Harvard Review describes Davis’s poetry as “unflinchingly candid and enduringly compassionate,” and Orion Magazine declares that “like poets Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, Davis is committed and spiritually anchored to his home ground.”

He’s the author of seven full-length collections of poetry— Coffin Honey, Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His poetry has appeared in Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry and has been anthologized in such books as The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and Bedford/St. Martin’s textbook, Approaching Literature. His poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editor’s Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, and have been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. More than 300 of his poems have appeared in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Ecotone, North American Review, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, West Branch, River Styx, and Poetry Daily.