David Baker is a poet, educator, editor, and literary critic. He was born in 1954 in Bangor, Maine, grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, and since 1983 has lived in central Ohio. He received his B.S.E. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Central Missouri and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah, where he also served from 1980-83 as Editor and Poetry Editor of Quarterly West. Since 1984 Baker has taught at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where he is currently a teaching Emeritus Professor of English. Baker also serves frequently on the faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College and at writers’ workshops around the country. After serving as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review for more than twenty-five years, he currently curates the annual “Nature’s Nature” feature for the magazine.
David Baker is the author or editor of nineteen books, including thirteen books of poetry, most recently Whale Fall (2022, W. W. Norton), Swift: New and Selected Poems (2019, W. W. Norton), Scavenger Loop (2015, W. W. Norton) and Never-Ending Birds (2009, W. W. Norton), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize in 2011, and six books of prose, most recently Seek After: On Seven Modern Lyric Poets (2018, SFASU).
His individual poems and essays have appeared in the country’s finest journals, including American Poetry Review, Antaeus, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Criterion, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Raritan, The Southern Review, Tin House, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review. His poetry has been anthologized in The Longman Anthology of Poetry, The Making of a Sonnet, The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and many others.
Among his awards are prizes and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation, Ohio Arts Council, Mellon Foundation, Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Foundation, Utah Arts Council, Society of Midland Authors, and Ohioana Library Association. In addition to his work at Denison University, Baker has taught at Kenyon College, the University of Michigan, the Ohio State University, Jefferson City Senior High School, as well as at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Frost Place, Chautauqua Institute, Poetry by the Sea, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Catskills Poetry Workshop, and The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops in Italy and Ohio.
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