Ken Lauter

Ken Lauter studied with Donald Hall (US Poet Laureate 2006-07) at the University of Michigan, and his work has been compared to Robert Lowell’s. Distinguished poet William Meredith has said that Ken’s poetry displays “a splendid and various gift.”

He has received a Hopwood Award for poetry, an American Academy of Poets Prize, and a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship. He has taught literature and creative writing at four universities and worked as a mayor’s aide, a university administrator, and a grass-roots environmental activist.

His books are: The Other Side; Before the Light; The Ghosts: Notes from a Field Study; Songs from Walnut Canyon; Grand Canyon Days; Searching for Mr. Stevens; The Structure of the Body; Time After Time: a Novel in Verse; First Kingdoms: Poems from a Vanishing Landscape; Vermeer in Words; Postcards from Paradise: A Tucson Spring; New Mexico Notebook: Late Summer in the Mountains; 50 Years: Poems for My Wife: Interrogations: Poems Posing Questions; and Cosmic Questions: Poems in Our Galactic Moment. Forthcoming in 2023 are Mortality & Other Hassles and In the Company of Animals: Poetry and Prose on the Path to a Peaceable Kingdom.

Ken's work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, and the poem "Eyes" was featured in 2016 as the frontispiece for reAppearances, a book of fine art photography by Susan Hacker Stang. (See video of Ken reading the poem at the book's launching.) He has also written several plays, including The Dancing Apsárás, or Captain Willard’s Blues, a prequel/sequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Ken is married to poet and neuroscientist Dr. Judy Lauter, author of How Is Your Brain Like a Zebra? - A New Human Neurotypology; Light from the Left: Poems on Paintings by Rembrandt; and nine books of haiku with her own photographs. She has also published three volumes of a projected eight-volume autobiography. Forthcoming in 2023 is: The Neural Rainbow: the Center the Perimeter, and the Brain. Ken and Judy currently live in Nacogdoches, Texas.

For more, visit: KenLauter.com