David Wojahn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, and educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. His first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets' prize, and published in 1982. The collection was also the winner of the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Book Award. His second collection, Glassworks, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, and was awarded the Society of Midland Authors' Award for best volume of poetry to be published that year. Pittsburgh is also the publisher of Mystery Train (1990), Late Empire (1994), The Falling Hour (1997), and Spirit Cabinet (2002).

 

Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004, published by Pittsburgh in 2006, was a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. World Tree, released by Pittsburgh in 2011, was awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, given for the outstanding book of American poetry published during the previous year. The collection was also awarded the Poets' Prize, and the Library of Virginia Literary Award, given for the most notable collection of verse published by a Virginia author during the prior year. Pittsburgh published his ninth collection of verse, For the Scribe, in 2017, which was the winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry. He was also a 2009 winner of an Outstanding Faculty Award from State Council for Higher Education of Virginia, and in 2008 received a University Award for Distinguished Scholarship from Virginia Commonwealth University.

 

Wojahn is also the author of three collections of essays on contemporary poetry, Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2015), and Addressee: Essays on How Poetry Matters (Unbound Editions, 2025). He is the editor (with Jack Myers) of A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry  (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), and two posthumous collections of Lynda Hull's poetry, The Only World (HarperCollins, 1995) and Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2006).

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He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois, Virginia, and Indiana Councils for the Arts, and was the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Fellow. 

 

Wojahn is Emeritus Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a member of the Program Faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts. He lives in Henrico, Virginia, with his wife, Noelle Watson,  and his twin sons, Jake and Luke.