Geffrey Davis

Author

Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Other honors include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have been published by Crazyhorse, Mississippi Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Nimrod, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches with the University of Arkansas’s MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and with The Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA Program. He also serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

But if my father craved a thing, he also abused time for it. When that thing was fishing, he would neglect necessities like food and water rather than be pulled back toward the everyday teeth of the world. And during the peak of a salmon run, work and family could suffer. In the middle of the night or early the next morning, we’d shuffle with exhaustion through the front door, smelling of evergreens and, if we were lucky, of fish—neither of which would unfold my mother’s worried arms.

To this day I, too, will ignore hunger and hours if I reach my full stride while fishing or writing. So in a sense, from the beginning, my art of angling (and of poetry) and the well-being I experience while wading into stream or page have been entangled—and perhaps even leavened— according to the elements leveling home all these years.

Contributors

Annie Dillard