Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA), a national center for graduate education in the fine arts, announced today that poet David Wojahn, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2007, has been named as the new FacultyChair for the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. Wojahn will assume his new position on June 26th with the start of the program’s Summer 2012 residency.
Wojahn joined VCFA in 1983 and has since served as a member of the MFA in Writing poetry faculty. He is also a Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Wojahn is the 2008 recipient of The Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry. His first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and published in 1982. The collection was also the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. His second collection, Glassworks, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, and was awarded the Society of Midland Authors’ Award for best volume of poetry to bepublished during that year. Pittsburgh is also the publisher of four of hissubsequent books, Mystery Train (1990), Late Empire (1994), The Falling Hour (1997), and Spirit Cabinet (2002).
His most recent collection, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004, published by Pittsburgh in 2006, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Wojahn is also the author of a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), and editor (with Jack Myers) of A Profile of 20th Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), and two posthumous collections of Lynda Hull’s poetry, The Only World(HarperCollins, 1995) and Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2006).
Wojahn has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois and Indiana Councils for the Arts, and in 1987–88 was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar.
In addition to VCFA, Wojahn has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University ofHouston, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Orleans.