Todd Davis

Todd Davis is the son of a veterinarian and United Methodist lay minister and the grandson of subsistence farmers.  His poetry offers portraits of the cycles of birth and death in the woods and streams of his homeground in Pennsylvania. While never leaving behind the tragedies and joys of the human world, fusing narrative and lyrical impulses, his work seeks to address the living world through a lens of transformation.  In poems of praise and lament that draw upon the classical Chinese rivers-and-mountains tradition, Davis chronicles the creatures of forest and sky, of streams and lakes, moving through cycles of fecundity and lack, paying witness to the fundamental processes of the earth that offer the possibility of regeneration, even resurrection. Davis is the author of five full-length collections—Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow: The Thoreau Poems.  His writing has been featured on the radio by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and by Ted Kooser in his syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry. His poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Bronze Award, and have been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been published in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Orion, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, and Gettysburg Review.  He teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.