Jon Davis is the author of three chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry, Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), Scrimmage of Appetite (University of Akron Press, 1995), for which he was honored with a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and Dangerous Amusements (Ontario Review Press, 1987), for which he received a G.E. Younger Writers Award and the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has also received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Lannan Residency, and a fellowship to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including Photographers, Writers, and the American Scene; Poet’s Choice; Sixty Years of American Poetry; The Best of the Prose Poem; and Telling Stories: A Writer's Anthology, and in literary journals such as The Georgia Review, Manoa, Hambone, American Letters & Commentary, Iowa Review, Narrative, and Poetry. His poems have also been translated into Arabic and Vietnamese. About his poems, June Owens, writing in Manoa, had this to say: “Davis’s poems so deeply probe the human condition that we find ourselves lost in new, perplexing, and unidentifiable territories, where our minds and our preconceived ideas about loss and remembrance, pain and epiphany are completely changed.”

In addition to poetry, he has written and published short stories, reviews, essays, and parodies. He has also written or co-written scripts for short films that have screened at the National Geographic All Roads Film Festival, National Museum of the American Indian Film & Video Festival, The American Indian Film Festival, and on Movieola: The Short Film Channel in Canada.

For four years, he taught screenwriting for the ABC/Disney Summer Film & Television Workshops. He has also served as Writing Program Coordinator for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, edited the literary journals CutBank, Shankpainter and Countermeasures: A Magazine of Poetry & Ideas, and taught at College of Santa Fe, Santa Fe University of Art & Design, and Salisbury University (Maryland). He is currently Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught since 1990.

Davis will serve as Poet Laureate through June 2014, during which time he will make public performances marking important civic occasions as well as present educational seminars for teachers and the public.

You can follow Davis’ activities as Poet Laureate on his blog, http://santafelaureate.blogspot.com/