Geffrey Davis

Geffrey Davis (born 1983) is an American poet and professor. He is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014) and Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019). He teaches in The Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing & Translation at the University of Arkansas and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas with his wife and son. He also serves on the poetry faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Revising the Storm won the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, selected by Dorianne Laux, and was named a finalist for the 2015 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Davis has received the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation.His poems have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines, including Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, The New York Times Magazine, Nimrod International Journal, and Sycamore Review. In 2011, Davis co-founded the journal Toe Good Poetry with Jerry Brunoe and Kevin Hockett. In 2018, he received a fellowship from the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

His second book of poetry, Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019) won the 2018 James Laughlin Award, a second-book prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Davis was born in Seattle, Washington in 1983 and grew up in Tacoma, Washington. He has two younger brothers and a younger sister. At the time of Geffrey's birth, his father was in the Navy, although a serious ankle injury led to his medical discharge. He became a blue-collar worker after that: roofing, welding, building custom campers, etc. Geffrey's father developed a drug addiction when Geffrey was a toddler, causing the family to move around frequently while he was growing up. The family lived in 10 different cities and about 14 different houses, including a trailer park and a little time spent in a family shelter. One memorable place they lived (when Geffrey was about 7 or 8 years old) was a large farm in a small, rural town called Onalaska, WA. The farm had all kinds of livestock and wide fields of hay. Geffrey left that farm with a deeper love of the outdoors and especially of fishing. When he was partway through the 4th grade, the family moved to Tacoma, WA, where they more-or-less put down roots. Many of these places appear throughout Geffrey's poetry, especially his first book Revising the Storm (2014). His mother worked primarily in education and childcare, often relying on side jobs to make ends meet, until the housing crisis in 2008 forced her to work full-time for a major department store retailer.

Geffrey graduated from Stadium High School, a public school in Tacoma that’s also a historic landmark. The school’s building was originally constructed to be a luxury hotel, but a massive fire gutted the interior and derailed those plans. The Tacoma School District purchased the property and reconstructed the inside into a school, although the exterior still retained its French château design. Fun fact: the movie 10 Things I Hate About You (a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew) was filmed while Geffrey was going to school there. Geffrey graduated from high school in 2001 and started writing poetry seriously that summer almost by accident, after a best friend (who was already a prolific writer) invited him to try writing a poem.

Geffrey earned his B.A. from Oregon State University in 2006, made possible through a combination of scholarships and federal aid. Throughout college, he also worked several different jobs—washing dishes, plumbing, painting houses, tutoring—to help pay his way. All of these experiences find their way into his poetry. As an undergraduate student, Geffrey first double majored in Zoology and Photography (intending to become a wildlife journalist and study wolves), but he started struggling with many of the required courses for the science degree and nearly failed out of college. He was encouraged by mentors to switch his major to English, given his tendency to take literature courses as electives. He fell in love instantly with his new major—his grades and academic experience improved immediately. As an English major at Oregon State, he took creative writing courses from the poets Joseph Millar and David Biespiel and from the fiction writer Marjorie Sandor, all of which deepened and developed his ongoing growth as a writer.

After taking a year off after graduation, Geffrey worked at a grocery store until he moved to State College, PA, where Geffrey received three graduate degrees—an M.A. in English (2009), an M.F.A. in Poetry (2012), and a Ph.D. in English (2014)—from The Pennsylvania State University.

As a grad student, Geffrey was enrolled in the MA/PhD track (not creative writing), which focused on studying and writing critically about literature. However, he kept sneaking into the occasional creative writing workshop. After completing the MA (Master of Arts) degree in English (in 2009), the poet Robin Becker, who was a professor of creative writing at Penn State at the time, invited Geffrey to join the creative writing program in poetry. He became dually enrolled in both the PhD program and the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program. He completed the MFA degree in 2012 (under the mentorship of poets Robin Becker and Julia Spicher Kasdorf). His first book, Revising the Storm, began as his MFA thesis and was revised heavily over the next two years.

As a grad student at Penn State, Geffrey met his now-wife, scholar and writer Lissette Lopez Szwydky, and they have a son. While a graduate student at Penn State, Geffrey joined Cave Canem, which the poet regularly praises for having heavily influenced his development as a writer and a teacher.

• "From 35,000 Feet / Praise Aviophobia" was adapted into a short film by Motion Poems, directed by Chad Howitt.