Steve Davenport

Steve Davenport is the author of Uncontainable Noise (2006), which won Pavement Saw Press’s Transcontinental Poetry Prize and was short-listed for that year's National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) finalist category in Poetry.  His “Murder on Gasoline Lake,” published originally in Black Warrior Review and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2007, is now available as a New American Press chapbook.  

Steve earned his PhD at University of Illinois, where he has served in the Creative Writing Program since 2004 as the Associate Director, and is the Ninth Letter’s Creative Nonfiction Editor.   The Summer 2008 issue of The Literary Review carries a chapbook of his recent poetry and fiction, free for the downloading at TLR’s website http://www.theliteraryreview.org/chap.html.  The poetry in that chapbook, “Curtal Sonnets from American Bottom,” won him a Charles Angoff Award for best contribution that volume year.  In addition to poetry and prose in dozens of literary magazines, his scholarly work can be found in academic journals, university press anthologies, and educational materials. 

About Uncontainable Noise, Kathleen Graber writes, “What there is . . . of the cowboy in these poems is an attitude which transcends the simple and violent lexicon of Remingtons and bullets; it is an archetypal outlaw spirit, a resistance and resilience, that passionate, uncontainable style of being in the world that makes the cowboy so very dark, both darkly irresistible and darkly dangerous.”  Another reviewer, Eric Miles Williamson, puts it this way: “Steve Davenport writes like Charles Bukowski might have written if he’d been able to hold his liquor better.”