James Galvin

1951 –
Read poems by this poet

James Galvin was born in Chicago in 1951 and was raised in northern Colorado. He earned a BA from Antioch College in 1974 and an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1977.

Galvin has published numerous collections of poetry, including As Is (Copper Canyon, 2009); X: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2003); Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975–1997 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Lethal Frequencies (Copper Canyon Press, 1995); Elements (Copper Canyon Press, 1988); God’s Mistress (HarperCollins Publishers, 1984), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Marvin Bell; and Imaginary Timber (Doubleday, 1980). He is also the author of a novel, Fencing the Sky (Henry Holt, 1999), and the critically acclaimed nonfiction work The Meadow (Henry Holt, 1992).

Galvin’s honors include a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Galvin lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he has worked as a rancher for part of each year all his life, and in Iowa City, where he is a professor emeritus in the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.