Daniel Lusk is author of Kissing the Ground: New & Selected Poems, published in 1999 by Onion River Press (Vermont). The poems of this award-winning poet reflect broad experience of what is at once most ordinary and remarkable in America’s rural landscape.
Since leaving his native Iowa, Daniel has worked as a ranch hand, laborer, door-to-door salesman, preacher, clerk, sportswriter, jazz singer, teacher, and administrator. He writes poems whose physicality reflects work in packing plants, on farms and ranches, and whose contemplative poetics betray his love of nature as well as his education in philosophy and religion and his background in the arts.
Books by Daniel Lusk also include The Cow Wars, Poems, 1982, and Wild Onions, (chapbooks), O, Rosie, a novel, Homemade Poems: A Handbook, and several anthologies of poetry, most recently Onion River: Six Vermont Poets. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, among them Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Chariton Review, American Poetry Review, New Letters, and The North American Review.
In 1995 he received the Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America for a poem on the American scene, and in 2006 he was awarded second prize in the Pablo Neruda Awards sponsored by Nimrod International Journal. In 2006-2007 his poetry was among finalists and semifinalists in a dozen national and international competitions, including The National Poetry Series, Dana Awards and Sarabande Books contests.
His weekly reviews and commentaries on books have been broadcast by 160 affiliate stations of National Public Radio, and have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chicago Sun-Times. He has been awarded grants and literary fellowships from the Vermont Arts Council, Vermont Arts Endowment and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as residencies at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. In 2009 he received an innovative research grant from the University of Vermont to work on a cycle of poems about Lake Champlain.
As teacher and lecturer, Daniel has conducted workshops for students of all ages and master classes for teachers in more than 200 schools, colleges and art centers across the nation. He has presented readings at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Renwick Gallery (Washington, D.C.), The Frost Place (Franconia, NH), and other venues, among them state universities of Missouri, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota and Vermont. Recent readings and residencies abroad have included Wexford; Ireland; Osnabruck; Germany; Prague; The Czech Republic; and Belfast; Northern Ireland.
He teaches poetry and creative writing at University of Vermont.