Garrick Davis

Garrick Davis is an American poet and critic. He was born in Los Angeles, California in 1971.

He is the founding editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review, the largest online archive of poetry criticism in the English-speaking world. The CPR was founded in 1998, and was one of the earliest literary reviews in the United States to be published exclusively on the Internet. Regular contributors to the review have included a number of distinguished American poet-critics including Ernest Hilbert, David Yezzi, Adam Kirsch, Dillon Tracy, Bill Coyle, and Joan Houlihan. Its regular foreign contributors include the Irish poet-critics Justin Quinn and David Wheatley, and the Indian critic Rabindra Swain.

His criticism appears regularly in the Contemporary Poetry Review. His work has also been published in the New Criterion, the Weekly Standard and Humanities magazine.

His poetry has appeared in a number of literary magazines including Verse, McSweeney’s, the Alabama Literary Review, and the New York Sun.

He served as the literary specialist of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington DC from 2005-2008. He has also served as the specialist responsible for the NEA’s Arts Journalism Institutes and the Poetry Out Loud program.

Poetry

Terminal Diagrams (Ohio University Press/Swallow, 2010)

Anthologies

Child of the Ocmulgee: The Selected Poems of Freda Quenneville. Edited by Garrick Davis (Michigan State University Press, 2002)

Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism. Edited by Garrick Davis (Ohio University Press, 2008)

This anthology was widely reviewed. It is now considered one of the standard reference works on New Criticism. The critic for the Virginia Quarterly Review noted: “Given our long-term disregard of the New Criticism, Davis‘s compendium is especially welcome....Davis provides richly informative, well-argued, and elegantly styled introductions, head-notes, and annotations, as well as discriminating suggestions for further reading.”