David Baker is Professor of English and holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Swift: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming, W. W. Norton), Scavenger Loop (2015, W. W. Norton) and Never-Ending Birds (2009, W. W. Norton), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. His six critical books are Seek After: On Seven Modern Lyric Poets (2018), Show Me Your Environment: Essays on Poetry, Poets, and Poems (2014), Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets (2012), Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (2007, with Ann Townsend), Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (2000) and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996). Dr. Baker’s poems and essays have appeared widely in such magazines as American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, The Yale Review, and more than a hundred others. For his work he has received fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Society of Midland Authors.
At Denison, Dr. Baker teaches classes in creative writing, poetry writing, American and modern literature, poetic theory, and others. He has taught previously at Kenyon College, the University of Michigan, and The Ohio State University, and occasionally serves on the faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. Dr. Baker also is Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. In 2012, 2006 and 2001 he served on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.