Daniel Lusk is author of Lake Studies: Meditations on Lake Champlain (Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, 2011) and Kissing the Ground: New & Selected Poems (Onion River, 1999) (see Books).
Since leaving his native Iowa, he has worked as a laborer, hospital intern, TV sound technician, door-to-door salesman, preacher, clerk, sportswriter, ranch hand, jazz singer, itinerant poet, free-lance writer, NPR commentator, teacher, and university 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 Onion River: Six Vermont Poets, three chapbooks—The Cow Wars, Poems, 1982, and Wild Onions—O, Rosie, a novel, and Homemade Poems: A Handbook. His work has 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, The North American Review, and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Billy Collins, Editor.).
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 a Pablo Neruda Award by Nimrod International Journal. His poetry has been among finalists in national and international competitions that include The National Poetry Series; the Dana Awards; James Hearst Poetry Prize, North American Review (Honorable Mention); Comstock Review Poetry Prize; Anhinga Poetry Prize, Anhinga Press; Ann Stanford Prize, Southern California Anthology (Honorable Mention); and the River Styx Poetry Prize (Honorable Mention).
His weekly reviews and commentaries on books have been broadcast by 160 affiliate stations of National Public Radio (NPR), 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.
Daniel has presented readings of his work at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Smithsonian Institution, and Renwick Gallery (Washington, D.C.), The Frost Place (Franconia, NH), and at Stranmillis University College-Queens (Belfast, N.I.) and other venues, among them state universities of Missouri, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota and Vermont. A Senior Lecturer in English Emeritus of the University of Vermont, he is available for poetry readings, workshops, and master classes in poetry writing and teaching.