Jeff Walt grew up in Clearfield, PA among a community of railroad workers, bricklayers, and strip-miners. His working-class poetry is informed by a childhood immersed in rowdy hillbilly culture: country songs, dirty jokes, alcoholism, and welfare, which he depicts with a bluesy compassion. His poems also explore a curiosity about surprise, form, syntax, and structure.
His chapbook, Soot, was co-winner of the 2009 Keystone Chapbook Prize from Seven Kitchens Press and published in 2010; several poems were selected and scored by composer David Sisco and performed at Carnegie Hall as “Songs from a Mill Town” on November 14, 2014. He has been awarded the New Millennium Poetry Prize, the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review, the Oscar Wilde Award from Gival Press, and the Davoren Hanna International Poetry Prize.
His book, Leave Smoke, was published by Gival Press in October 2019. Of it, Kim Addonizio writes, “…readers can take heart from Jeff’s humor and sharp-eyed observations of the more absurd aspects of twenty-first century American life (electric vaginas, the three Wise Men in thongs, the Muse as a dominatrix). What’s left but to find love where we can and insist on celebrating, ‘our bodies spooned, flawed, used.’”
He received his M.F.A. from Goddard College in Vermont and his poems have appeared in Poetry International, Los Angeles Review, The Sun, Alligator Juniper, Cimarron Review, Southword, Lascaux Review, Reed Magazine, The Cream City Review and others.
