Peter Campion

Peter Campion earned his BA from Dartmouth College and his MA from Boston University. His collections of poetry include Other People (2005), The Lions: Poems (2009), which won the Levis Reading Prize, and El Dorado (2013). He has also written monographs and catalog essays for the painters Joseph McNamara, Terry St. John, Mitchell Johnson, and Eric Aho. He regularly publishes literary and art criticism in numerous journals and has won a Pushcart Prize.

Equally comfortable in formal and free verse, Campion writes poems that deftly bridge intimate and social concerns. Campion’s former professor, the poet Robert Pinsky, notes in an AGNI review of Other People that the “closeness of the uncanny to the quotidian is Peter Campion’s kind of material.” David Biespiel, reviewing The Lions in the Oregonian, observes, “Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.”

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Campion has held a George Starbuck Lectureship at Boston University and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University. He has also taught at Washington College, Ashland University, and Auburn University. His other honors include the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Campion is the former editor of Literary Imagination, the journal of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC). He is an associate professor in the department of creative writing at the University of Minnesota.