Poet Wally Swist speaks at the
University of Connecticut, March 25, 2009
Matt Lin/UConn Daily Campus

Wally Swist's poems most recently have appeared, or are forthcoming, in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Appalachia: America's Longest-Running Journal of Mountaineering & Conservation, From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright (Duluth, Minnesota: Lost Hills Books, 2008), The Light in Ordinary Things (Berkeley, California: Fearless Books, 2009), Solace in So Many Words (Lindenhurst, Illinois: Hourglass Books, 2010), Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, and Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku (Ormskirk, United Kingdom: Snapshot Press, 2010).

He has read his work thoughout New England, including in the Distinguished Lecture Series at the Lenox Library, in Lenox, Massachusetts, a series hosted by Boston University Professor Jeremy Yudkin; at the 20th Anniversary of western Massachusetts Recycling, to open the program for keynote speaker Massachusetts Senator Stan Rosenberg, followed by Congressman Richard Neal and Springfield Mayor Dominic Sarno; in Julia de Burgos Park, in Willimantic, Connecticut, an event sponsored by Curbstone Press; and in a reading entitled Poets Living in New England (Creative Session) at the 40th Anniversary of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), in Boston.

A recording of a poem ("Ode to the Omelette"), from his performance in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, accompanied by jazz cellist Eugene Friesen, a member of the Paul Winter Consort, held at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, is archived at npr.org. The poem was originally aired nationally on Scott Simon's Weekend Edition Saturday and introduced by NPR host Linda Wertheimer.

He is a recipient of two fellowships in poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1978 and 2003) as well as two back-to-back one-year writing residencies (2003-2005) at Fort Juniper, the home of the late Robert Francis. A documentary film regarding his work, primarily shot at Fort Juniper, In Praise of the Earth: The Poetry of Wally Swist, was released by filmmaker Elizabeth Wilda (Hadley, Massachusetts: WildArts, 2008).

The author of seventeen books and chapbooks of poetry, his most recent collection, Mount Toby Poems (Fulton, Missouri: Timberline Press, 2009), was published in a letterpress limited edition. An earlier book of poems, The New Life (West Hartford, Connecticut: Plinth Books, 1998), was chosen twice by Small Press Distribution (SPD) for their list of poetry Best-sellers, in November 2007 and in March/April 2009.

A forthcoming book, entitled Luminous Dream, a collection of fifty-one love poems, will be issued from FutureCycle Press. The manuscript was chosen as a finalist for the 2010 FutureCycle Poetry Book Award.

He is also the author of a scholarly monograph, The Friendship of Two New England Poets, Robert Frost and Robert Francis: A Lecture Presented at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009).

His books and papers are archived in Special Collections at the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts and in the American Haiku Archives in the State Library of California, in Sacramento, California.

Complete bibliography


[Updated June 30, 2010]