DAVID WAGONER
Guest Editor
The Best American Poetry 2009

 
 
  David WagonerDavid Wagoner was born in Massillon, Ohio in 1926, the son of a steel-mill worker. He grew up in Ohio and Indiana. As an undergraduate at Penn State he studied with Theodore Roethke. After working briefly as a reporter, he joined Roethke on the faculty of the University of Washington in 1954. His most recent book of poems is A Map of the Night (University of Illinois Press, 2008). He is the author of eighteen other collections, including The House of Song, Good Morning and Good Night, and Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems (University of Illinois Press, 1999). He has written ten novels, includingThe Escape Artist (1965), which Francis Ford Coppola adapted into a movie. He edited Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63 (1972) and wrote a one-person play about Roethke, First Class, that had a six-week run in Seattle in the summer of 2007. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Wagoner was the editor in chief of Poetry Northwest from 1966 until its last issue in 2002. He has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and lives in Lynnwood, Washington.

 
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