Photograph by Hamilton Matthew Masters

BIO

Geffrey Davis was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. He studied literature and writing at Oregon State University and at Penn State University.

Davis is the author of three books of poetry: One Wild Word Away (BOA Editions, 2024); Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Revising the Storm ​(BOA Editions, 2014), winner the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

A recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Breadloaf, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center, Davis has poems published or forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Nation, New England Review, ​​The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Oxford American, Ploughshares, POETRY Magazine, and elsewhere. He has also been awarded the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Porter Fund Literary Prize, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and a public engagement fellowship from the Whiting Foundation for his involvement with The Prison Story Project, which strives to empower incarcerated women and men to tell their own stories through writing.

Davis currently lives in the Ozarks, where he teaches for the Program in Creative Writing & Translation at University of Arkansas. Davis is also core faculty for The Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program and serves as Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.