Jeff Shotts

Jeff Shotts grew up in rural central Kansas and earned his BA from Macalester College and MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. After college and graduate school, Shotts worked at Graywolf Press, first as an editorial assistant and then as an editor for poetry and nonfiction; he is currently executive editor at Graywolf. Shotts has discussed the role of the editor and the similarities between editing poetry and nonfiction. In LitHub, he notes, “I am struck how editing poetry and editing nonfiction are complementary endeavors. Editing them both should be an act of immersing yourself in music—the music of the line and the music of the sentence, and the larger structures of a score. Both are genres of persuasion, where content and style are, at their best, essentially the same thing.”

Shotts has taught or lectured on poetry and editing at many institutions, including the University of Houston, the University of Iowa, Sarah Lawrence College, and others. He is on faculty at the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.