Bin Ramke

Bin Ramke was born in Port Neches, Texas, in 1947. He began writing poetry while an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, where he read the work of the Modernist poets, particularly Wallace Stevens, and took a poetry workshop with Stanley Plumly. After receiving his BA, he went on to earn an MA from the University of New Orleans and a PhD in English literature from Ohio University.

In 1978, the poet Richard Hugo selected Ramke’s first poetry collection, The Difference Between Night and Day (Yale University Press, 1978), for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series. Ramke’s other poetry collections include Massacre of the Innocents (University of Iowa Press, 1995) and Wake (University of Iowa Press, 1998), both of which won the Iowa Poetry Prize.

In Poets & Writers Magazine, Craig Morgan Teicher describes Ramke as “a poet whose work has gotten progressively stranger and stronger. Ramke has emerged as one of the avant-garde’s treasured half-secrets.” While Ramke’s early collections are relatively autobiographical and influenced by the Texas and Louisiana landscapes, his more recent books tend to approach the same themes through the integration of fragmented quotations, history, and science.

Ramke taught at Columbus College in Georgia for several years, and he edited the University of Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Series from 1984 to 2005. He holds the Lawrence C. Phipps Humanities Chair at the University of Denver, where he teaches creative writing and edits Denver Quarterly.