David Baker
David Baker was born in Bangor, Maine, on December 27, 1954. He was raised in Missouri and has spent more than forty years of his life in the Midwest.
Baker received degrees in English from Central Missouri State University before earning a PhD in English from the University of Utah in 1983.
His first collection of poems, Laws of the Land, was published by Ahsahta/Boise State University in 1981, followed by Haunts (Cleveland State University) in 1985. Since then, Baker has published several collections of poetry, including Scavenger Loop (W. W. Norton, 2015); Never-Ending Birds (W. W. Norton, 2009); Treatise on Touch: Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2007); Midwest Eclogue (W. W. Norton, 2005); Changeable Thunder (University of Arkansas, 2001); The Truth about Small Towns (University of Arkansas Press, 1998); After the Reunion (University of Arkansas Press, 1994); Sweet Home, Saturday Night (University of Arkansas Press, 1991); and Swift: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2019).
Baker is also the author of three books of criticism: Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf, 2007), Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (University of Arkansas, 2000), and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996).
About Baker, the poet Linda Gregerson says, “[He] writes with the distilled, distinguished attentiveness only the finest poets can reliably command,” and Marilyn Hacker has called him “the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright.”
Among Baker’s awards are fellowships and prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, the Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation.
A resident of Granville, Ohio, he is currently a professor of English and the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University, where he serves as poetry editor of The Kenyon Review.
