Black Light (II)

David St. John is the author of twelve poetry collections, including The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming from Ecco Press, 2017), The Window (Arctos Press, 2014), and The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012). He edited The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016), a posthumous collection by the poet Larry Levis, and co-edited American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W.W. Norton & Company, 2009) with the poet Cole Swensen. He has been awarded both the Rome Prize Fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the O.B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from The Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation, along with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is university professor and chair of English and comparative literature at The University of Southern California. Photo by Stephanie Diani