David St. John

1949 –
Read poems by this poet

David St. John was born in Fresno, California, on July 24, 1949. He received his BA in 1974 from California State University, Fresno, and an MFA from the University of Iowa.

St. John’s many books of poetry include The Last Troubadour (Ecco, 2017); The Window (Arctos Press, 2014); The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012); The Face: A Novella in Verse (HarperPerennial, 2005); Prism (Arctos Press, 2002); The Red Leaves of Night (HarperCollins, 1999); and Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems (HarperPerennial, 1994), which was nominated for the National Book Award.

St. John is also the author of the volume of essays and interviews Where the Angels Come Toward Us (White Pine Press, 1995) and co-editor, with Cole Swenson, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2009). He is also the author of two libretti: one for Donald Crockett’s opera The Face, which is based on St. John’s book of the same name, and one for Frank Ticheli’s choral symphony The Shore.

The poet Robert Hass says of St. John’s writing:

It’s not just gorgeous, it is go-for-broke gorgeous. It is made out of sentences, sweeping through and across the meticulous verse stanzas, that could have been written, for their velvet and intricate suavity, by Henry James.

St. John is the recipient of many honors and awards, including both the Award in Literature and the Prix de Rome Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Discovery/The Nation Prize, the George Drury Smith Award from the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He has also received several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2016, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2017.

St. John currently teaches in the PhD Program in creative writing and literature and is the chair of the English department at the University of Southern California. He lives in Venice Beach, California.