Email walt.mcdonald@ttu.edu
© Walt McDonald, 2006
Updated 08/30/06
Walt retired from Texas Tech University in May 2002 as Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of English and Poet in Residence. Founder and director of the creative writing program, 1971-2000. Poetry Editor, Texas Tech University Press, 1975-1995.
Before joining the faculty at Texas Tech: Pilot, U.S. Air
Force; taught at the Air Force Academy.
Ph.D., University of Iowa.
Teaching Fields Creative writing; modern
American fiction and poetry.
Publications
Twenty-two collections of poems and one book of fiction, including these recent books:
Faith Is a Radical Master. Abilene Christian University Press, 2005.
A Thousand Miles of Stars. Texas Tech University Press, 2004.
Climbing the Divide. University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.
Great Lonely Places of the Texas Plains. Texas Tech University Press, 2003--Walt's poems paired with color photos by Texas State Photographer Wyman Meinzer.
All Occasions. University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.
Whatever the Wind Delivers: Celebrating West Texas and the Near Southwest. Texas Tech University Press, 1999--Walt's poems, with photographs selected by Janet Neugebauer from Texas Tech's Southwest Collection, with a Foreword by Laura Bush, when she was First Lady of Texas.
Blessings the Body Gave. Ohio State University Press, 1998.
Counting Survivors. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.
Where Skies Are Not Cloudy. University of North Texas Press, 1993.
All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems. Texas Tech University Press, 1992--Walt's poems, with photographs selected by Janet Neugebauer from Texas Tech's Southwest Collection.
Night Landings. Harper & Row, 1989.
A Band of Brothers: Stories from Vietnam. Texas Tech University Press, 1989.
After the Noise of Saigon. University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Rafting the Brazos. University of North Texas Press, 1988.
The Flying Dutchman. Ohio State University Press, 1987.
Books Co-edited
A ‘Catch-22’ Casebook. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973 [co-edited with Frederick Kiley].
Texas Stories & Poems. Texas Center for Writers Press,
1978 [co-edited with James P. White].
More than 2,300 poems published in journals
and collections including America, American Poetry Review, The American
Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Christian Century, Christianity
and Literature, Connecticut Review, First Things, The Formalist, The Georgia
Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, Image, JAMA (The Journal of
the American Medical Association), The Kenyon Review, London Review of
Books (UK),
The Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review,
Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, The New Criterion,
New England Review, New Letters, New York Review of Books, The North American
Review, Northwest Review, The Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Phi Kappa
Phi Forum, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Seneca
Review, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Southwest
Review, Stand Magazine (UK),
The Texas Review, The Threepenny Review,
TriQuarterly, and Windsor Review (Canada).
Recent Honors & Awards
Western Writers of America’s Spur Award in 2005 for Best Book of Poems.
Texas Book Festival Bookend Award, lifetime award "for Outstanding Contributions of Texas Literature," Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, 2004.
Texas Poet Laureate for 2001.
President's Book Award (First Prize) for All Occasions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), Texas Tech University, 2002.
Four Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame for Whatever the Wind Delivers; All That Matters; The Digs in Escondido Canyon; and Rafting the Brazos.
Six awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, including the Lon Tinkle Memorial Award for Excellence Sustained Throughout a Career, awarded in 2000.
A.C. Greene Literary Award, West Texas Book and Author Festival, Abilene, Texas, 2002.
Two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships.
Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award for Blessings the Body Gave.
The Juniper Prize for After the Noise of Saigon (University of Massachusetts Press).
George Elliston Poetry Prize for The Flying Dutchman (Ohio State & University of Cincinnati).
1992 Texas Professor of the Year. Awarded by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), Washington, D.C.
Poet Laureate of Lubbock, appointed by Lubbock's Mayor.
Appointed as Paul Whitfield Horn Professor by Texas Tech's Board of Regents, 1987.
Appointed as Texas Tech's Poet in Residence, 1988.
Texas Tech Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumnus Award, 1988.
Faculty Distinguished Research Award (Barnie E. Rushing, Jr., Award), Texas Tech University Dads and Moms Association.
President's Excellence in Teaching Award, Texas Tech University.
AMOCO Outstanding Teaching Award, Texas Tech University.
El Paso Energy Foundation Faculty Achievement Award, Texas Tech University.
President's Academic Achievement Award, Texas Tech University.
Examples of Published Poems:
- (For easy access to a few of Walt's poems, click on the "Samples" link at the top or bottom of this C.V. Also, others are linked to Walt's listing in The Academy of American Poets' website -- poets.org.)
- Other examples of recent poems are listed here:
"Words I Looked Up in World War Two." JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 287.3 (2002): 287. 2493
"Wherever Puff Goes." JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 289.7 (February 19, 2003): 811. 2148
"Oranges for My Sister When She Was Nine." JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 285.22 (2001): 2828.
"800 Acres on the Plains." Ploughshares 26.1 (2000): 95-96.
"A Brief Familiar Story of Winter"; and "Opening the Cabin in March." Orion 19.1 (Winter 2000): 45.
"The War in Bosnia, the Beach at Kitty Hawk." The Christian Century 117.15 (2000): 538.
"Watching Dawn on Padre Island." JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 282:21 (1999): 1990 e.
"Killing Nothing but Time"; and "Batting Practice at Sixty." The Sewanee Review 107.4 (1999): 524-525.
"Old Pets." Poetry 172.5 (1998): 276.
"After the Madness of Saigon." JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 280.6 (1998): 492l.
"When Rockets Fell Like Stars." First Things 85 (1998): 18.
"The Waltz We Were Born For." First Things 81 (1998): 27.
"Uncle Earl's Wind River Ranch." London Review of Books (UK) 19.2 (1997): 30.
"After the Fires We Once Called Vietnam" and six others. The Missouri Review 20.3 (1997): 42-53.
"Spitfire"; and "Crossing the Road." The Sewanee Review 104.1 (1996): 38-40.
"Jogging with Oscar." The Southern Review 32.4 (1996): 637-638.
"Rembrandt and the Art of Mercy." New England Review 16.3 (1994): 68.
"Seconds of Free Fall and Chaos." The American Scholar 62.2 (1993): 260.
"Heirlooms." The Atlantic Monthly 270.5 (1992): 108.
"The Digs in Escondido Canyon"; and "Wishing for More than Thunder."Poetry 160.4 (1992): 187-188.
"The Goats of Summer." The Atlantic Monthly 265.4 (1990): 54.
"Digging on Hardscrabble"; and "Goat Ranching on Hardscrabble." The Paris Review 115 (1990): 51-54.
"Starting a Pasture." Poetry 157.3 (1990): 151-152.
"Hawks in a Bitter Blizzard." The Atlantic Monthly 264.3 (1989): 82.
"Digging in a Footlocker." New York Review of Books 36.15 (1989): 19.
"When Children Think You Can Do Anything"; and "Losing a Boat on the Brazos." Poetry 149.5 (1987): 280-281.
"Wind and Hardscrabble." The Atlantic Monthly 256.1 (1985): 46.
"Catching the Light at Lake Raven"; "Fathers and Sons"; "For Dawes,
on Takeoff"; and "Memento Mori." Poetry 144.6 (1984): 332-334.
Examples of Poetry and Fiction in More than Sixty Anthologies and Texts:
Shadow and Light: Literature and the Life of Faith, 2nd Edition. Edited by Darryl Tippens, Jeanne Murray Walker, Stephen Weathers. Abilene, Texas: ACU Press [Abilene Christian University Press], 2005.
The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002. Edited by Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young. (Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2002)
Because I Fly: A Collection of Aviation Poetry. Ed. by Helmut Reda. (McGraw-Hill, 2002)
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Carolyn Forché. (Norton)
The Best Spiritual Writing 1999. Philip Zaleski. Harper San Francisco (HarperCollins)
Vital Signs: Contemporary American Poetry from the University Presses. Ronald Wallace. (University of Wisconsin Press)
Perrine's Sound and Sense, Ninth Edition. Thomas R. Arp. (Harcourt Brace)
Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense, Sixth & Seventh Editions. Also, Story and Structure, Eighth Edition, and Sound and Sense, Ninth Edition. Perrine and Arp. (Harcourt Brace)
Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading. Lee Jacobus. (Prentice Hall)
The Presence of Others. Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz. (St. Martin's Press)
Vietnam Voices: Perspectives on the War Years, 1941-1982. John Pratt. (Viking/Penguin; Georgia)
Unaccustomed Mercy: Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War. W.D. Ehrhart. (Texas Tech)
The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry.
Leon Stokesbury. (Arkansas)
Selected Essays and Chapters about McDonald's Books:
The Waltz He Was Born For: An Introduction to the Writing of Walt McDonald. Edited by Janice Whittington and Andrew Hudgins (Texas Tech University Press, 2002).
Ronald Baughman. "Walter McDonald." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Documentary Series. An Illustrated Chronicle, Volume Nine: American Writers of the Vietnam War. Detroit: A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, Gale Research Inc., 1992. 215-274.
Philip D. Beidler. "Poets after Our War." Rewriting America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation. The University of Georgia Press, 1991. 4, 146, 183-191.
Special issue of Christianity and Literature on McDonald's poetry, edited by Darryl L. Tippens. Christianity and Literature 49.2 (2000).
Steven Cramer. [Review of Night Landings] Poetry 156.2 (1990): 100-102.
Vince Gotera. Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans. The University of Georgia Press, 1994. 28, 80-90; 213-214; 330 (n.15).
William Kerns. "Following the Golden Thread." Texas Techsan Magazine 48.4 (July/August 1995): 22-24.
Dave Oliphant. "Voices of Work and Spirit." The Texas Observer, September 3, 1999, 27-28.
Thomas Zigal. [Review of The Flying Dutchman and After
the Noise of Saigon] "Prizes for a Plains Poet." The
Dallas Morning News. Sunday, April 10, 1988, 14C.
Selected Interviews:
Phyllis Bridges. "An Interview with Walt McDonald." In The Waltz He Was Born For: An Introduction to the Writing of Walt McDonald. Edited by Janice Whittington and Andrew Hudgins. Texas Tech University Press, 2002. 216-225.
"Evidence of Grace: An Interview with Walter McDonald."
Darryl L. Tippens, Interviewer. Christianity and Literature
49.2 (2000): 173-187. Tippens' interview in also on-line in Valparaiso
Poetry Review 3.2 (2002).
Web site for VPR is http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/v3n2/html
"Interview with Walter McDonald." Fred Alsberg, Interviewer. Westview 17.2 (1998): 1-11.
"Interview with Walt McDonald." Chris Ellery, Interviewer. Concho River Review 10.1 (1996): 31-49. Ellery's interview is also on-line in ND Review (Notre Dame Review, on-line), Issue 11, 2002.
Interview with Walter McDonald, Rebekah Presson, Producer, "Contemporary Writers on Radio," New Letters on the Air. University of Missouri at Kansas City, October 12, 1995.
Robert Compton. Interview/article. The Dallas Morning
News, June 5, 1990.
Offices in Professional Organizations
Councilor, The Texas Institute of Letters, 1989-93.
Literature Advisory Panel, Texas Commission on the Arts, 1986-88; Chair, 1987-88.
President, Conference of College Teachers of English of Texas, 1985-86. Councilor, 1977-80.
President, Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers, 1974-76.
Poetry Readings and Workshops
More than 160 at universities and museums,
including: Abilene Christian University; University of Alabama (Birmingham,
Huntsville, & Tuscaloosa); Baylor University; Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh;
University of Cincinnati; Hardin-Simmons University; Houston Baptist University;
Kansas State University; Kenyon College; Louisiana State University; University
of Mississippi; Mississippi State University; University of Southern Mississippi;
University of Missouri at Kansas City; Nebraska Poetry Circuit; Ohio State
University; University of Oklahoma; Our Lady of the Lake University; The
Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.); Southern Methodist University; Texas A&M
University; Texas Christian University; Texas Woman's University.
Links