John Poch was the inaugural Colgate University Olive B. O’Connor Creative Writing Fellow from 2000-2001, and now teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University where he is professor of English and has served as director of creative writing. In spring 2014 he was a Fulbright Core Scholar, teaching at the University of Barcelona in Spain. His most recent book of poems, Between Two Rivers, a collaboration with the photographer Jerod Foster, was published in April by Texas Tech University Press. A full-length collection, Texases, was also published by WordFarm Press in April, 2019. Fix Quiet, won the 2014 New Criterion Prize and was published in 2015. The previous book of poems, Dolls, was published in September 2009 with Orchises Press. Two Men Fighting with a Knife (Story Line Press 2008) won the Donald Justice Award. His first book, Poems, was published in January 2004 from Orchises Press and was a finalist for the PEN/Osterweil prize. The Essential Hockey Haiku (a poetry/fiction collaboration with Chad Davidson) was published by St. Martin’s Press in Fall 2006. A limited edition letterpress/art book, Ghost Towns of the Enchanted Circle (Flying Horse Editions 2007) is a collaboration with the printmaker Ryan Burkhart.
Poch was a recipient of the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize in 1998 and has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Saltonstall Foundation, Fundación Valparaiso, and Blue Mountain Center. He has published poems in Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Agni, The New Republic, Yale Review, The Nation, Iowa Review, Poetry, and many other literary magazines. For ten years, he was the editor of the award-winning 32 Poems Magazine and is currently the series editor for the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.
