Beck Series reading by poets and authors David Baker and Peter Grandbois.
Baker taught creative writing and literature classes at Denison from 1984 to 2024. He served as Chair of the English Department, Director of Creative Writing, and held the Thomas B. Fordham Endowed Chair. Baker’s twenty-plus books of poetry include the just-published “Transit” (2026), “Whale Fall” (2022) and “Swift: New and Selected Poems” (2019). He has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, Mellon Foundation, Society of Midland Authors, Ohio Arts Council, Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation, and more. His poems and essays appear regularly in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and his work was recently included in the landmark anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker.
Grandbois is the author of fifteen books, including, most recently the novel/novella pairing “Cat People and Dream Memories of the Fifty Foot Woman” (Spuyten Duyvil 2025). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in nearly two-hundred different journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio.