CREATIVE WRITING

Jon Davis, IAIA Faculty

Biography:

Jon Davis was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduating high school, he worked as a shipping clerk, warehouse manager, carpenter’s helper, sewer cleaner, and stonemason before attending the University of Bridgeport to study with the poet Dick Allen. He received his B.A. in English and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, where he was editor of the literary journal, CutBank.
Since receiving his degrees, he has served as Writing Program Coordinator for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, edited the literary journals Shankpainter and Countermeasures: A Magazine of Poetry & Ideas, and taught at the University of Montana, College of Santa Fe, and Salisbury State University. Since 1990, he has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Poem:

Education:

University of Montana B.A., English; M.F.A. Creative Writing

Major Professional Activities:

Professor Davis has published five collections of poetry, including Scrimmage of Appetite, for which he was awarded a 1998 Lannan Literay Award in Poetry. He is currently completing work on two new books of poetry, Voyd of Course and Heteronymy. He has received a number of awards for his poetry, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the G.E. Younger Writers Award, the Lanan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and a fellowship to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

His poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies including The Last Best Place; Photographers, Writers, and the American Scene; Poet’s Choice; Sixty Years of American Poetry; Cape Discovery; No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 Poets; The Best of the Prose Poem; The Georgia Review; Manoa; Denver Quarterly; Harvard Review; Iowa Review; Missouri Review; Ploughshares; Poetry; The Prose Poem; and Quarterly West.

In addition to poetry, he writes and publishes fiction and critical essays, and is currently finishing work on a stage play and three screenplays.

Teaching Statement:

"As a teacher of creative writing, I am always seeking the balance between rigor—regarding craft, knowledge of the traditions, and self-criticism—and the pleasures of the unexpected, the ”unwilled,” the imagined. But I believe, too, that to teach writing and literature is also to teach life and living."

Blog:

voydofcourse.blogspot.com