David C. Wojahn
Professor of English
Virginia Commonwealth University
David Wojahn is Professor of English and Director of the Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he has taught since 2003. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1953, and educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona.
Professor Wojahn’s first collection of poetry, 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). His most recent collection, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004, was published by Pittsburgh in 2006, and was one of three named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Professor Wojahn is also the author of a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001). He is editor (with Jack Myers) of A Profile of 20th Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991) and 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, and the Virginia, Illinois, and Indiana Commissions for the Arts. In 1987-88 he was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar. In 2008 he was named VCU’s Outstanding Faculty Award Winner in Scholarship, and was chosen as the annual winner of the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize.
Professor Wojahn has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University of Houston, the University of Alabama, the University of New Orleans, and the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of the Fine Arts, where he continues to teach as a member of its field faculty. His poems and essays have appeared in over 200 journals and anthologies, among them Poetry, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, The New York Times Book Review, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and The Georgia Review. He lives in Richmond with his wife, Noelle Watson, and sons Luke and Jake.
