James Galvin Biography

James Galvin was born in Chicago and earned a BA from Antioch College and an MFA from the University of Iowa. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Resurrection Update: Collected Poems (1998), X (2003), As Is (2009), and Everything We Always Knew Was True (2016). He has also published the novel Fencing the Sky (1999), and The Meadow (1992), a prose meditation on the landscape of the Wyoming-Colorado border and the people who live there.

Galvin’s work is infused with the genuine realities of the western landscape, while at the same time not shirking difficult questions of faith, the vicissitudes of life, and shifting intimacies. Poet and critic Mark Tredinnick commented, “All Galvin’s writing arises from and expresses a musical engagement with the world.” Tredinnick also found Galvin’s work to be “profoundly ecological,” stating that “[h]is writing, particularly The Meadow, but all of his prose and poetry, starts from the principle . . . that we are the land’s, not the other way around.”

Galvin has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation for his poetry. For many years he has been on the permanent faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, spending part of the year in Iowa City, Iowa, and the remainder in Tie Siding, Wyoming, where he grew up and still ranches.