Geffrey Davis

Award-winning Poet

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  • An Evening with Geffrey Davis

Biography

“Geffrey Davis translates and transforms our contemporary modes of love, violence and history.” –Terrance Hayes

“All his subjects, even the loathsome ones, are beloved. All his speakers are filled with hope, always seeking a new definition for humane, constantly revising the storms inside themselves.” —The Rumpus

“Davis’s language winds and branches like water rolling down a dirt hill.” – Muzzle Magazine

Geffrey Davis is the author of three full collections of poetry: One Wild Word Away (Magers & Quinn, 2024), Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019), and Revising the Storm ​(BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. Oliver de la Paz reflects about Night Angler: “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament. We partake in the rituals of fatherhood―both coming into and growing out of the spiritual bond. We witness the anguish of loss but also the possibilities of childhood. And in that threshold between life and death where all fathers and sons traverse, the brilliant harmonies of understanding arise in rainbowed arcs like epiphanic trout rising to kiss the sun. Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” He is also the author of the chapbook Begotten (URB Books, 2016), coauthored with F. Douglas Brown.

About Revising the Storm LA Review of books observes, “A mother crying alone in her kitchen, a hungry boy unable to sleep in his bed, the unbearable weight cast by an absent father—these quotidian and universal miseries are by no means exclusive to the world of poetry, but when rendered in verse by a talented poet such as Davis, readers bare witness with new eyes. Revising the Storm is a considerable collection replete with the dark troubles and misfortunes of life that only serve to make its moments of beauty that much brighter.”

His honors also include a 2019 NEA Grant for Creative Writing, the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse​, ​Mississippi Review, New England Review, ​New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

​A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas’s MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and for The Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program. He also serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

Short Bio

Geffrey Davis is the author of three full collections of poetry: One Wild Word Away (2024), Night Angler (2019), and Revising the Storm ​(2014), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. He is also the author of the chapbook Begotten (URB Books, 2016), coauthored with F. Douglas Brown. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse​, ​Mississippi Review, New England Review, ​New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. ​A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas’s MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and for The Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program.

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