Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Lazarus Species, a current finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry and of Philomath which was a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Levis Reading Prize. Philomath was the first poetry collection to be named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize.

Walker-Figueroa grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range. After leaving home at fifteen, she received her education from Chemeketa Community College, Cornell University, Bennington College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and New York University, where she was the Jill Davis Fellow in Fiction.

As an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar, Walker-Figueroa researched quondam sites of resource extraction in the Namib and Kalahari Deserts, exploring the decay of industries and towns within the context of ecological and cultural recovery and reconfiguration.

She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing, co-directs the Levis Reading Prize, and serves as the faculty poetry editor of Blackbird.

In the past, Devon has worked as a professional ballet and modern dancer, researcher, classical and folk harpist, and bartender. 

Devon’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nation, POETRY, American Poetry Review, The New York Review Of Books, Ploughshares, and New England Review.

More from and about Devon Walker-Figueroa: “The New Pastoralism” (Diagram) • “Philomath” (New England Review) • “The Perch” (American Poetry Review) • “[To A Strange, Hollow, And Confused Noise, They Heavily Vanished]” (The New York Review) • “Drain” and “The Peasant’s Orgasm” (LitHub) • “After Birth” (The Poetry Foundation) • “Lazarus Species” (Conduit) • “Polyphase Secrets” (Poetry Daily) • “Formalwear” and “Optimal Stopping” (The Nation)

Author image: David Ewan McDowell