David Wagoner is the author of nineteen collections of poetry, including After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He is the author of ten novels, including The Escape Artist (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), which was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the 1991 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, six yearly prizes from Poetry, two yearly prizes from Prairie Schooner, and the 2011 Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007, his play First Class was given forty-three performances at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966–2002, and he is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. Wagoner also teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop.  

Photo by Robin Seyfried, 2010