Robert McDowell

Robert McDowell is a proponent of narrative and formal resurgence in American poetry as well as poetry as spiritual practice. McDowell’s poems, narratives, and lyrics focus on 20th-century American life. His first full-length book, Quiet Money (1987), was published by Henry Holt And Company in 1987. He has since published four full-length collections, including On Foot, in Flames (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002) and The Diviners (Story Line Press, 1995), a book-length poem. McDowell is also the author of Poetry as Spiritual Practice (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008).

McDowell was born in 1953 in Alhambra, California. In the early 1970s, he studied at UC Santa Cruz with Raymond Carver and poet and Kayak magazine fo under George Hitchcock. In the 1980s, McDowell and Mark Jarman created the controversial literary magazine The Reaper, dedicated to poems of form and narrative. The Reaper overlapped in its last years with the founding by McDowell, Jarman, and Lysa McDowell of Story Line Press, a nonprofit literary press recognized by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as one of the nine most influential independent publishers in the United States.

McDowell’s honors include selection as a Winnetta Blake Scholar at the University of Maine, a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers Conference, a Woolrich Fellow at Columbia University, a visiting writer at UC Santa Cruz, a visiting poet at Bennington College, and a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. 

McDowell created the Rural Readers Project, which for ten years sent contemporary authors and materials into dozens of underserved areas in the Northwest, Northern California, upstate New York, and Arkansas.