Walt McDonald

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

McDonald 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), a volume of poems paired with color photos by photographer Wyman Meinzer; All Occasions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000); Whatever the Wind Delivers: Celebrating West Texas and the Near Southwest (Texas Tech University Press, 1999), collected 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 (The Ohio State University Press, 1998); Counting Survivors (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Where Skies Are Not Cloudy (University of North Texas Press, 1993); and All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems (Texas Tech University Press, 1992), with photographs selected by Janet Neugebauer He has also published a book of fiction, A Band of Brothers: Stories from Vietnam (Texas Tech University Press, 1989).

McDonald published more than 2,300 poems in journals. He 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 was the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor Emeritus at Texas Tech University. 

McDonald died in Richardson, Texas, on January 22, 2022.