Todd Davis, winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, teaches creative writing, environmental studies, and American literature at Penn State Altoona, as well as in the MFA program at Penn State University Park. His poems have appeared in The North American Review, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Christian Science Monitor, West Branch, River Styx, Arts & Letters, Quarterly West, Green Mountains Review, Poetry East,and Image.  He is the author of three books of poetry—The Least of These (Michigan State UP, 2010), Some Heaven (Michigan State UP, 2007), and Ripe (Bottom Dog Press, 2002)—and co-editor of Making Poems:  40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State U of New York P, 2010).  His poems have been featured on the radio by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and by Marion Roach on The Naturalist’s Datebook, as well as by Ted Kooser in his syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry.  In addition to his creative work, Davis is the author or editor of six scholarly books, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade, or How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism (State U of New York P, 2006) and Mapping the Ethical Turn:  A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (UP of Virginia, 2001).

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 In the Kingdom of the Ditch