Work

John Poch earned an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Texas. He is President’s Excellence Research Professor of English in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University. His fifth collection of poems, Texases, was published in April 2019 (WordFarm Press). He has won many awards for his writing, including the New Criterion Poetry Prize, the Donald Justice Award for Poetry, the Discovery/Nation Prize, the Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College, the Colgate Creative Writing Fellowship, and recently an Everett Southwest Prize for his fiction. His first book, Poems, was published in January 2004 from Orchises Press and was a finalist for the PEN/Osterweil prize. He is the editor of the book, Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South (TTU Press 2020).

His book of essays on spiritual poems, God’s Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination, was published by St. Augustine’s Press in April 2022. He has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Saltonstall Foundation, Fundación Valparaiso (Spain), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center. He has published poems in Ploughshares, Paris Review, Yale Review, Iowa Review, Agni, and many other literary magazines. For ten years, he was the editor of the award-winning 32 Poems Magazine and is a co-editor of the poetry anthology: Old Flame: From the First Ten Years of 32 Poems Magazine. He was a Fulbright Core Scholar at the University of Barcelona in 2014. He is currently the series editor for the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize.

He lives in Lubbock, Texas, with his wife and two daughters.