Walt McDonald

Walt McDonald was born on July 18, 1934, in Texas. In addition to serving as an Air Force pilot and teaching at the Air Force Academy, he earned a PhD from the University of Iowa in 1966.

He is the author of twenty collections of poems, including Climbing the Divide (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Great Lonely Places of the Texas Plains (Texas Tech University Press, 2003, poems paired with color photos by Texas State Photographer Wyman Meinzer); All Occasions (2000); Whatever the Wind Delivers: Celebrating West Texas and the Near Southwest (1999; with archival photos selected by Janet Neugebauer from Tech's Southwest Collection), which won a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame; Blessings the Body Gave (1998); Counting Survivors (1995); Where Skies Are Not Cloudy (1993); All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems (with photographs selected by Janet Neugebauer; 1992); Night Landings (1989); After the Noise of Saigon (1988); Rafting the Brazos (1988); and The Flying Dutchman (1987). He has also published a book of fiction, A Band of Brothers: Stories from Vietnam (1989).

McDonald has published more than 2,300 poems in journals including American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, First Things, Journal of the American Medical Association, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and Poetry. He has received six awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, including the Lon Tinkle Memorial Award for Excellence Sustained Throughout a Career, and four Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. He also served as Texas Poet Laureate in 2001. He is the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor Emeritus at Texas Tech University.