David Woo is the author of Divine Fire (Georgia Review Books, an imprint of the University of Georgia Press), named by Ron Charles of The Washington Post as one of the top poetry collections of 2021, and The Eclipses (BOA Editions), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. The son of immigrants from China, he was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and studied English at Harvard College and Stanford University and Chinese at Yale. He lived in Asia for several years, working as a teacher for a volunteer organization, and was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, Poetry London, The New Republic, the Library of America’s American Religious Poems, and other journals and anthologies. His reviews, essays and interviews have appeared at the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books, The Georgia Review, Literary Hub, Alta Journal’s California Book Club, The Kenyon Review, Forbes, On the Seawall, The Adroit Journal, and the Poetry Society of America. He is on the board of directors at the National Book Critics Circle, where he is the chair of the poetry committee for 2024. Of Divine Fire, the late Harold Bloom wrote, “I expect David Woo to be one of the two or three poets of his generation. Divine Fire is even more wise, eloquent, and light-bringing than was his first book, The Eclipses. David Woo now writes the poems of our climate, in the tradition of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Elizabeth Bishop.”
Bluesky: @davidwoo.bsky.social
[Twitter: @DavidWooPoet—no longer posting as of 2024]
Texts and images are by David Woo unless otherwise noted.
