Davis McCombs

Davis McCombs was born in 1969 and grew up in Hart County, Kentucky. He attended Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and Stanford University. He is the author of three volumes of poetry including Dismal Rock (Tupelo Press 2007) and lore (University of Utah Press, 2016).

His first book, Ultima Thule, was chosen by W. S. Merwin as the winner of the
1999 Yale Series of Younger Poets and went on to be named one of five finalists for a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.

He is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth
Lilly Poetry Fellowship, the Larry Levis Editor’s Prize from The Missouri Review, the Dorset Prize, the Laman Library Writers Fellowship, the Agha Shahid Ali Prize, and the Porter Fund Literary Prize.

His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, the Pushcart Prize anthology (XXXVII), Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry 1996, Best American Poetry 2008, and many other publications.

McCombs directs the Program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville where he lives with his wife, the poet and photographer Carolyn Guinzio, and their two children.

Photograph credit: Carolyn Guinzio