John Poch

John Poch took an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Texas. He was the Colgate University O’Connor Writing Fellow from 2000-2001, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Grace College in Indiana. He is the author of eight collections of poems. Fix Quiet (St. Augustine’s Press 2015) won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. Two Men Fighting with a Knife (Story Line Press 2008) won the Donald Justice Award. His first book, Poems, was published in January 2004 from Orchises Press and was a finalist for the PEN / Osterweil prize. The Essential Hockey Haiku (a poetry / fiction collaboration with Chad Davidson) was published by St. Martin’s Press in Fall 2006.

Poch was a recipient of the “Discovery” / The Nation Prize in 1998 and has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Saltonstall Foundation, Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center. He has published poems in Ploughshares, Paris Review, Yale Review, Iowa Review, Agni, and many other literary magazines. He was a founding editor of the award-winning 32 Poems Magazine. He was a Fulbright Core Scholar at the University of Barcelona in 2014. He is currently the series editor for the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize.

He is a co-editor of the poetry anthology: Old Flame: From the First Ten Years of 32 Poems Magazine and editor of the anthology Gracious: Poems from the 21^st Century South (TTU Press 2019).  His translation of the Italian poet Pietro Federico’s poetry collection La Maggioranza delle Stelle (Most of the Stars) was published by St. Augustine’s Press in 2024. He is the author of two books of criticism: God’s Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination (St. Augustine’s Press 2022) and Notes on the Poet (Measure Press 2023). He is co-director of the Winona Christian Writer’s Conference.